I hate writing serious columns.

I hate writing serious columns because whenever I write one, it means something terrible has happened:  the tsunami.  Hurricane Katrina.  9/11.  The death of my friend Steve.  And now, Virginia Tech.

I’ve spent the better part of the last 18 years on college campuses, so Monday’s shooting feels especially painful and especially wrong and especially real – my heart started thumping when I started writing this.  I keep thinking about students and professors I know whose biographies sound so much like the biographies of the victims:  The baritone horn player.  The English major taking a French class.  The Air Force cadet.  The civil engineering student who ran track.  The aeronautical engineering professor.  The rabid Detroit Tigers fan.

When things like this happen, I read.  I read because the more I know, the more I can think, and the more I can think the better chance I’ll be able to write something.  Because I have to write something.  As a science, writing is imprecise, and as an art it is elusive, but as a means for making sense of what’s inside of you, it has no peer.

Of course, there is no sense to be made of what happened at Virginia Tech.  Very little of the media reaction feels like much sense, either.

But as I was reading the blog of Detroit Tigers outfielder Curtis Granderson on ESPN.com, something did make sense.

That rabid Detroit Tigers fan killed in the shooting was Brian Bluhm, a 25-year-old graduate student in civil engineering.  As Granderson explained in his post on Wednesday, “I never had the pleasure of actually meeting Brian,” but Brian “had e-mailed me a couple of questions for my Q&A in the past, though his questions were not yet selected. Here is one of those questions that I will now answer:

Brian Bluhm (Blacksburg, Va.): What are your personal and team goals for the season?

Curtis: It’s hard for us as a team to set a goal and say we want to win a certain amount of games or win the World Series, because it’s too hard to focus on one specific thing for so many games. Our team goal is pretty simple, though – basically prepare ourselves to play for nine innings every day, every series and against every opponent. For me individually, it’s more of just trying to play my role the best I can every day. One day I may lead off and start in center field, where I'll need to set the tone and cover and control the outfield. Another day, I may bat eighth or ninth and I'll have to set the tone for the big guys at the top of the lineup.”

That answer made sense to me, and here’s how.

So much of the reaction to this tragedy has focused on big issues – gun control, violent culture, campus safety, anger management – and has discussed them in a national scope.  But when the journalists and politicians scrutinize issues in that sort of context, it’s easy for the rest of us to feel lost, detached and hopeless, and that once something else has pushed this from the headlines, and the arguing and shouting has quieted, very little will have changed.  And then the next time something tragic like this happens, a new storm will erupt, but it will look and feel and sound very much like this storm, and the storms that came before it.

I say that not to sound defeatist, but to acknowledge that most big issues are like that:  overwhelming, intimidating, and seemingly intractable.

It’s like trying to focus on winning the World Series in the third inning of a tie ballgame in April – there’s not much you can do about it.  At least not right then.

Or to put it in the context that I’ve used so often when coaching my track stars:  it’s like fixating on the finish line before you’ve even left the starting blocks.

When you’re in the starting blocks, you must be in the moment.  You must be present to what’s in your head and in your lungs and in your legs.  You must be conscious of the very small, very manageable, very controllable things you can do at that moment, and you must do them.

If you can be present – if you can, to use a track-specific term, be one with the A-skip when you are doing the A-skip – and take care of what’s immediately in front of you when it’s immediately in front of you, the finish line will come.

Put back in the baseball context, you can’t do very much about the World Series in April, per se, and yet you can do something, right then, in that ballgame, in that third inning, as that pitcher winds up and the ball approaches the plate.

You can be in the moment, and in that moment, strive not only to be your best self, but to bring out the best self in others.

And to take it back to Virginia Tech, no matter how big or how intimidating or how overwhelming the larger issues may seem, you can remember that the small issues, the daily issues, are right there in front of you – and that they are the way to the big issues.  Indeed, they are the big issues, writ small.

We can all, one by one, be present to ourselves, and each other.  We can pause daily to think about how we might make an impact right now, how we might better strive to be our best self, and how we might bring out the best in others.

Maybe that means holding our tongue when no kind word will come, or standing up for someone else who needs a little backup.  Maybe it’s going out of our way to perform a kindness no one else will ever know about or see, and maybe it’s speaking our mind even when we think nobody else could possibly agree with us, because evil is rarely born from too many ideas.

And maybe we step away from the diversion – the mindless entertainment into which we so often retreat – and take a few moments each day to be intentionally mindful:  to better educate ourselves about an issue that we say matters to us; to speak or act about a cause we care about; or to do something selfless and kind, simply because we can – and because there is no guarantee that we, or the recipient of that kindness, will be here tomorrow.