Where You Are

I have more or less successfully kept to a "news fast" since the fourth week of Janurary 2003. No papers, no magazines, no NPR, no CNN, no networks, no Yahoo!Ticker, nada. Yes, I do see the occasional headline, and will occasionally seek out news from basic info-based sources like the BBC, AlterNet, or Working for Change -- but the chronic news, the endless stream of overproduced, dramatized, background-noise "information" was what I wanted to turn off and leave off. And despite all the things that have happened in the world since then, nothing has convinced me to retreat. Now, with the state of things in Louisiana, and several of my EMT classmates going to join the relief effort, the fact that I'm still not plugging into the media frenzy has been called into question by some. I have (mostly) learned to keep my mouth shut when this sort of thing happens (pior instances ranging from the London bombings to the Tsunami to the death of the Pope), because if I say what I really think about how the media takes advantage of world crises to soak up ratings and how for every person affected by tragedy in the developed world there are thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of people starving to death or suffering from treatable diseases in the third world because they're not glamorous enough to be the popular "cause of the moment", I tend to piss people off and apparently paint myself as uncaring about current events.
I wonder what would happen if news were something we made, and not something done to us? If people felt generally compelled to do something more than write a check? Like, what would happen if instead of waiting for things to go wrong so we can have a bake sale, we chose to live in smaller houses, build sustainable infrastructures, do without the luxuries we take for granted like giant supermarkets and being able to drive everywhere, build communties based on interdependance so that when bad things happen there's no question of how everyone will be taken care of, take a humble slice of the world pie so that there's enough of everything for everybody? Or am I nuts?
I really like this, it showed up in my inbox back in September of '01 and then again last week; I plan on using it as a bookmark in my Paediatrics textbooks if I can ever figure out how to fight my way into school.
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Where you are right now is a very good place to be. For you are alive, aware, and able to make a difference.
Certainly things are not perfect. You may face uncomfortable situations, painful choices and difficult challenges.
Even so, where you are right now is a good place to be. For you have the opportunity to take whatever you have and make it into a life of value, meaning and fulfillment.
You have the extreme good fortune to be right here, right now. The more you see your life as the immense opportunity that it is, the more true richness you will uncover.
There is a path that leads to the best in life that you can possibly imagine. And the starting point of that path is where you are right now.
Pause for a moment and consider your many blessings. Then move forward and fulfill all the rich promise of where you are right now.
-- Ralph Marston