You’ve probably noticed recently that the news is even more negative than it was a year ago. We’ve added some wars, we’ve added some murders, we’ve added some social insurrection in Britain and other places, conflict, conflict, and more conflict.
The bad seems to be winning over the good. However, my personal experience and your personal experience, I think, are probably very similar. We don’t experience a lot of bad on a daily basis.
And at 69 years old, as I like to say, I have never been shot. I have never been stabbed. And most assuredly, because I am talking to you, I have never been blown up.
That said, bad things do happen to people, but not to me, and for the most part, not to you. We live in a good world.
I was listening this morning, actually, or rather reading a piece by Carl Jung when he was on basically a trip to Africa in the 1930s. He actually would get up very early to watch the sun come up, and he said it was truly magical.
It was as if, and these are my words, the hand of God was upon the horizon. And he suggests that the Africans didn’t like the dark, but they truly liked the light. And I think this is also true, isn’t it?
Most of us really enjoy the sunshine. We feel good when its rays wash over us, and even if we get a slightly bit sunburnt from time to time, we can still say that it is better to be in the sun than to be in the dark.
So then comes the question, why does the news continue to be so negative if we naturally don’t like it?
Well, I’ve read that when we first left Africa, the Rift Valley some one or two hundred thousand years ago, if we walked along, and we weren’t totally aware when there was perhaps a sound in the grass, supposedly the grass was quite high at the time,
above a man’s height, so if you heard something in the grass and you said to yourself, ah, it’s nothing, you were probably lunch or dinner, depending on that time of day, of course. A second thing I think that also occurred was that many people say
as a species, we are selfish. If we see five apples in a bowl and there are three people, someone will take three apples. And when you ask them why, they’ll say, gosh, I thought you were going to take the three apples.
But when we were walking in Africa, if I was only looking after me, I was dead. If I did not travel in a community, I wouldn’t be here today. My DNA would not be here, for sure, which means that we are not selfish as beings.
So my idea is that we actually become fearful. We’re fearful to have a loss and not have the things, and someone will take them from me. So I’m afraid.
And that’s why I perhaps do things like steal or hoard or et cetera is because of fear. So in other words, lack of love.
But one of the great tales that we often think about, I think as kids, as children, at least when I was young, was the tale of Robin Hood. So recently, I was walking the Camino, the way of St. James in Spain.
And on some of the days, we passed through an immense forest that was just overhanging and covering everything. It was like we had gone back to medieval times.
And the story of Robin Hood, of course, you probably know, is about a man, Robin, who falls out with King John. King Richard is away on a crusade, and his brother, King John, has taken over, and he seizes Robin’s land.
So he then goes into the forest in Sherwood Forest, which is in the center of Britain. He then assembles a band, and he then proceeds to do good. He steals from the rich.
This is an idiom in English, of course. He steals from the rich and gives to the poor. So in a sense, Robin is a good guy, and he falls in love with a woman made Marian, etc., etc.
Now, the story itself has many versions, as you can imagine, but there’s a man by the name of Sir Walter Scott in the 19th century, and he wrote a book called Ivanhoe, which highly popularized the tale of Robin Hood.
So you can see, for the most part, humanity is good. We want to do what is right, for everyone, for each of us. So the news media, as it continues to pound us with this negative news, must be taken with a grain of salt, as we say.
In other words, most of it is sensationalism, and most of it is probably not true.
So the mass protests that we’re seeing at the moment against perhaps Israel or against Russia, and I’m not supporting anyone here, but I think we might want to look deeper what the news media tells us on the surface, is probably just not true.
And ask yourself, what do you think? What do I think about the state of the world? And probably I’ve met Israeli people, and I’ve met Russian people.
They’re not bad people, are they? Of course not, because if I cut my arm, my blood is red, and that doesn’t matter whether I’m white, pink, orange, blue, whatever it is. So my suggestion is to look for the good.
When I awake in the morning, I should be grateful that I have one more day of consciousness. I’ve been blessed with another day, and I should look to the good throughout my day. Little story.
I’m just back home in Taiwan. So the other day, I get up quite early, my phone is fine, and then I look at my phone, and it freezes with the Google logo displayed. Try to turn it on, try to turn it off, nothing happens.
Uh-oh. So I get dressed, I have a shower, I proceed to the shop, and I’m really quite ignorant when it comes to technology. This is not my forte at all.
So I go into a store, and the woman looks at my phone, and she goes, oh, oh, oh. It’s the motherboard. Now, I have no idea what the motherboard is, but I put the two together, mother and board.
Obviously, mother has power, board is perhaps where all the electronic gadgetry is displayed. So mother must be like the technological Gaia, she’s in charge. I said, the motherboard?
She said, yes. And I said, hmm, the cost. And she tells me a huge amount of money.
And I go, oh, let me just check on that. So I think to myself, maybe, just maybe, I should make a comparison. So I go down the street, and there’s another shop.
And I finally speak to the technician who actually owns the store. His name is Joe. And he asks, What’s happened here?
Did you drop it? And I said, Yes, I’ve dropped it perhaps a number of times, but not recently. He said, Oh, well, it could be the motherboard, but it could also be the battery.
I said, The battery? He said, Yes, the battery. And we could replace the battery, and it could fix the problem.
So the battery is a very small percentage of what I was quoted. It is one-fifth of the price of the motherboard. So I said, Well, what are the chances that it’s going to actually work?
And he said, Well, 50-50. I thought pretty good odds. So I proceeded to go and try this.
I was gone for two hours, and I was a little bit distressed as you can imagine, you know. So I came back two and a half hours later, and I said to Joe, Joe, how are you? And he said, Are you ready?
I’m waiting to hear, Oh, oh, oh, oh, a fourth oh. It’s the motherboard. But he says instead, Leon, it’s good news.
It was the battery. And lo and behold, it was the battery. So a good thing, a win, if you will, a positive thing had come to me on Friday.
It was Friday when this problem happened yesterday. So I said to myself, Leon, you should be more of an optimist, a more of a hopeful man, which of course I am in honesty. So the name of his company is Black Box.
If you ever check it out, I was treated very well. So here we are. The negative news that I could receive easily in the morning, but I don’t listen to the news anymore.
This is another suggestion that comes from many people. Don’t look at your phone for the first two hours or so of the day. Just live in your own thoughts.
So there we are, as I said.
The day began positively, and then I had that negative occurrence, and then I fixed the problem, and then I listened to the news, which made me even more sad, and then I convinced myself it would be okay, and I went back, and everything was fine.
So like the story of Robin Hood, in the end, King Richard comes back to England, and he gives Robin all his land and his titles back, and he marries Maid Marian, at least in one of the tales.
So look after yourself, look for the positive, please take care, and you know what they say, you know what they say, critical thinking is necessary and critical thinking is truly great. We are smart, so let’s be smart. God bless. Bye bye.