Are YOU in Control of Your World???

We would all like to think that we are in control of our own ‘world’; in control of our personal life, our finances, our thoughts (well most of the time) and our future. However, if we stop and reflect on the year that has been, we may need to re-think just how much control we really do have and therefore what are our prospects?

 

Here are some events that NO-ONE had control over in 2011:

In the USA alone there were no less than 3,000 record breaking weather events! And while Texas wild fires destroyed over 1,000 homes, Thailand, Argentina and the east coast of Australia were being deluged by floods affecting hundreds of thousands more people.

Who will ever forget the images of the earthquakes in Turkey, New Zealand, and Japan with the devastating tsunami that followed?

Then there were the shocking images of drought, famine and starvation impacting on millions of people and wild life in the Horn of Africa..

And there was more….. 2011 had many significant political upheavals, particularly in the Middle East; changing the lives of entire nations.

Then of course economically none of us were in control through the Great Financial Crisis, which is still far from over,  as the US and European economies continue to labour under massive debt and mismanagement with seemingly no way out.

 

These are just some of the events that have impacted on many of us this year. It would  be just too depressing to mention the numerous random senseless killings and shooting rampages on the innocent that occurred this year as well!
 

Then on a personal level, even when we have done everything we can to guard the health of ourselves and our loved ones, anyone of us can be struck down and debilitated through disease and illness.

But I thought it was quite curious that in the meantime, scientists are spending millions of dollars and are so excited about trying to find the “God Particle” in beams of protons that are accelerated around a 27-kilometre ring at close to the speed of light before being smashed into each other! This seems really quite meaningless to me given the events listed above when maybe, we should really be looking for God (beyond colliding protons) who can turn all of this around and really improve our prospects.

I really like what Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) had to say in what came to be known as “Pascal’s Wager”. He stated that; “God is or He is not”!

Pascal was a mathematician, physicist and moralist. He also lived at a time that the existence of God was being searched for and contended.

Here is his very thought provoking argument:

 

“God is or He is not. But to which side shall we incline?

Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is.

Let us estimate the two chances. If you gain, you gain all;

If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then without hesitation that HE is”.

[Thoughts -1670]

As we are clearly not in control of our world, we need to side with someone who is…just sayin’

“What is Communication”?

If you were to consider the amount of communication that transpired electronically this year, you may argue that we are indeed great communicators. Here are some statistics that I googled today:



Tweets – 107,639 per minute
Face book posts – 2,716,00 in 20 minutes
Emails – averaged 294 billion each day
Text messages – 7 trillion from 4.8 billion mobile phones this year.

Interestingly, the most googled phrase this year was “what is love”? But what I would like to ask is, “what is communication”? While we clearly have a penchant for electronic communication, when it comes down to face to face communication with our fellow humans we don’t seem to be so willing.

For instance, as I walk past my colleagues at the same time each morning, very few will even look at me let alone say a greeting, Even though I have known them for years…and this upsets me! I have noticed also that as I pass the same neighbours each day, I endeavour to smile and greet them and again little or no response, this too makes me sad. Actually, I had one neighbour I use to pass each morning when I took my dog for a walk. We seemed to meet at a very narrow bridge each day, and we would practically touch each other as we passed and yet do you think this man would respond to my ‘good mornings’???

I was beginning to wonder if it was just me! Then I recalled a wonderful insightful poem written and recited by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993.
Whereby she powerfully and symbolically expresses the nuances of the human condition with poignant poetic prose,and touches on the many issues that impact on us, but what touched me the most was her conclusion:

Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister's eyes, into
Your brother's face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.

For me, this so beautifully synthesizes and combines into a coherent whole..what communication is!
I think it is only when we are able to communicate at this seemingly so simple level, that we can truthfully say we are good communicators…..just sayin’

Life Change

The incessant hum of the traffic lulls him into a dreamlike state, as it usually does, of unconscious awareness. Just the thought of the word traffic sends shivers down his spine. Reflecting on a recent trip to the Philippines, William Naylor still finds it difficult to comprehend the abject poverty of the majority from this island archipelago. The reality that not only is there traffic from the car chaos in Manila, but the fact that humans too, have also become commodities, trafficked as such, in nothing short of a modern day slave trade. He contemplates what Abraham Lincoln would think if he knew that in 2011 we still didn’t believe ‘that all men are created free and equal'.


His view from the fourteenth floor of the office building, where William has been an IT Specialist for the past 15 years, over looks Sydney’s Central Station. His attention now turns from the traffic he can hear to the people he can see coming and going and he wonders who they are. His eyes are drawn to a group of teenage school boys waiting for the traffic lights to turn green. They appear to be singling out one of the smaller guys. This is painful for William to observe as he recalls his years at high school and reminds himself, “I did enjoy primary school [public] but once I moved to high school [an all-boys private school], I was bullied extensively. I was so small for my age and didn’t know anybody. I will never forget that experience at the start of year 7. We did a test, algebra. I had never seen algebra before! I couldn’t comprehend what letters had to do with numbers, I got 9/100. The teacher pulled me up in front of the class and told everyone that I was really dumb. I ended up in remedial maths class.” But he refuses to dwell on this scene from the window or the one in his mind and engages his eyes elsewhere.


William is determined to make something of his life and has worked hard to get where he is today. Ignoring his father’s wishes for him to become a mechanic, and specialised in IT. However, even this seems somewhat futile, reasoning; “It becomes harder to look at server event logs and walk around the office to fix printers or find that document that someone had lost”. At the age of 41 he has got use to some things staying the same and use to other things that have changed. But William, like so many disenchanted generation X’ers, is seeking a meaningful change. Not just a ‘sea change’ or ‘tree change’, it’s not even just a ‘career change’. But William is seeking a ‘life change’ not to be defined by his past experience but to be refined by it. Not to just take what he can get out of life, but make a contribution, to give back. This is why William Naylor wants to become a writer.......just sayin' .