A BAD YEAR?

Recently I’ve seen numerous posts about the weather, natural disasters, the political climate and social issues, to name a few, with the words, “…it’s been a bad year”.

Has it really been a bad year?

I don’t believe so. There are events that have occurred, of weather, geology, political and social, that are bad, by many standards, but not all. We must admit that those events get more press time than the GOOD news.

Take time to smell the roses.

Added to that, the “year” has nothing to do with it. A “year” is a construct of measuring time by the seasons, a way for our finite minds to rope infinite time into manageable chunks.

In reading some of the daily Church liturgy recently, I am once again reminded that the turmoil we see in our time is truly “nothing new under the sun”. [Ecc. 1: 9-11] The turbulence of the earth, the warring of tribe against tribe, family against family, nation against nation, brother against brother, all are as old as humankind. [Matthew 10: 34-35]

A browsing through history shows us that the crisis’s we face today in our society aren’t new. They are just packaged in new wrappings. Same song, different verse, change of venue.

I wish I could find the quote, at the end of one of Richard Proenneke’s books, but I can’t. So paraphrasing, he comments that we are not meant to hear all of the sadness, evil and bad times around the world. We can’t absorb all of the bad news. For eons “we” would have heard the bad news in our immediate area for the most part, and in a small part the general area around us. Only in recent times have we been bombarded with bad news, instantly it seems, from around the world, and it can be overwhelming.

Focus instead on the good. There are millions of acts of kindness, of happy beginnings and endings every day. They happen in our own lives, in our family and friends lives, all around us. Focus on “It’s been a good year!” And your outlook will change.

This has been a good year!