Keeping Up with World Events

NOTE! If you enjoy this post, please feel free to twitter it with the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/cbc3c6. Thanks, I appreciate it!

I started the process of putting up photos and videos of our trip on a separate page. You can find the link on the side-menu or go here. If you want to see other travel videos they are available on my youtube channel. The page I’m putting together is very much a work in progress, since I haven’t been able to get the photo-album plugin working yet.

One of the things I noticed while we were away was that we were totally cut off from news of the world. We didn’t watch any TV, read any newspapers or listen to the radio. The only way we kept in touch at all was through twitter. That brought me the only piece of news which has really made a difference in my life, ie the fire which caused the closure of one of our local bridges.

We missed the CNN run-up to Obama’s inauguration. We were only vaguely aware of happenings in Gaza. Know what? The world got along just fine without my monitoring, while we were much less stressed without the need to fix the economy by morning.

This experience has caused me to consider kicking the news habit, or cutting way back. Normally, CNN is on all the time. Its background noise to me. I realize now that it is mostly irrelevant to my life and therefore a waste of energy.

Steven Covey made a compelling case for the correct place to invest ones energy and awareness. He said everything can be placed either in the circle of concern (things you can’t influence but you worry about anyway) or the circle of influence. The circle of influence is where you can actually accomplish something. Covey’s contention was that whichever circle you invested energy and awareness in would grow while the other shrank. One of his conclusions was that if you concentrated on enlarging the circle of influence you would eventually be able deal with some of the things that were previously out of your real control.

A slightly different way of looking at this is the saying: Feed opportunities and starve problems. For some reason, our culture has become problem focused and problem driven. Some schools of psychology even see all human behaviour as solving problems. The drawback with this approach is that what we focus energy on grows. This is the basis of the Law of Attraction. If you want to starve problems you invest the minimum energy necessary to deal with them on the immediate level and then turn your attention back to your opportunities.

I think this is the attitude that President Obama is trying to introduce as well. His talks always focus on the positive goal to be pursued. To me this is what he means when he tells Arab leaders that You will be judged by what you can build, not by what you can destroy; or when he tells the American people that The present situation reflects the mistakes of the past, not a lack of greatness. That last was a bit garbled. Sorry.

What I have come to realize is that spending too much time with the mass media was focusing my attention on all kinds of problems as though they were mine to solve. Just keeping up is taking time away from my life, and that means time I didn’t spend on some favorite creation or passtime.

Time is really the only thing we have to spend and nobody knows how large their account is. From now on, I resolve to defend my time against distractions and false alarms as if I were defending my house against burglars or vandals.

Related articles by Zemanta

• How To Be Happy Without Becoming A Monk – 10 Things I Have Changed To Live A More Self-Directed Life (masternewmedia.org)

Posted by: swampy | 01-28-2009 | 04:01 PM
Posted in: Uncategorized