FRIDAY, 7 DECEMBER 2018
I always feel like you have to know what’s going on in the world so you can be prepared for when something bad happens, or if someone who wants to do you harm crosses paths with you. If you’re only focusing on the positive, you are going to be as unprepared for the negative as Maya or Inca villagers were when European soldiers walked into their towns with their coughing and sneezing 500 years ago.
Fact is, however, that millions of bad things happen every day – literally, millions of bad things. Violence occur between people behind closed doors; robberies and murder are committed; attacks take place on unsuspecting people; one person or group bullies another person on the Internet, or at school, at work, or on the playground; people cheat other people out of their hard-earned savings. What you see on the one or two news channels you watch, or in the one or two newspapers or websites you visit, is a drop in the bucket. So, if you want to keep abreast of bad things happening, why settle for a drop in the bucket? How much do you think that drop will prepare you if you’re in a situation where you may become the victim of a malicious person?
The other thing is this: If you focus on positive people, and positive environments, chances are that you will in any case avoid, as far as possible, people who’d want to do you harm, and you most likely won’t venture into environments where there is an elevated risk for something bad to happen.
In the end, you can’t control everything that happens to you. All of us are trapped on a rollercoaster ride to some extent. Or I should rather say, we are all trapped on some or other rollercoaster. You do have a choice where you sit, though, and you sometimes have a very good idea what rollercoaster takes what kind of turns.
A new year is almost on our doorstep, so it might be a good time for a resolution: Go through your social media, and through your other sources of information throughout the day, and purge what doesn’t help you lead or create a better life. And, perhaps more for myself, maybe less news during breakfast is also not such a bad idea.
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