I should be so lucky part 2

Dear Bloggers,

OPINION: The road to hell may well be paved with good intentions, but nobody told me that you would have to listen to a chorus of whingers along the way.

I was listening to the Radio the other day and they were discussing how we were sliding of slowly towards some sort of hell and there was no way we would ever look back on these present times as the "good ol' days" like they had back in the fifties and sixties.

What a load of ….....
We all know about the 'glass half full or glass half empty' metaphor and I hesitate to suggest that the current level is starting to be unreflective of the unimaginable bounties that we currently possess.

In other words, our glasses are almost full and too many of us are nagging about the bit that we are missing at the top.
I started writing my blog today as I wanted to expound on some of the more positive things that are going on.

Well, today I wanted to write about how incredibly fantastic it is to be alive in this modern age. 'What are you on?' I hear you say.

No, nobody laced my breakfast with ecstasy this morning.

I sometimes think the opposite is going on.

Maybe the whole population is being drugged to suppress their excitement and enthusiasm at their good fortune to be living in these wild times.
I was tripping around my house this morning belting out the chorus of Kylie Minogue's 'I should be so lucky' and my five-year-old was telling me to stop singing. It looks like they have got her too. Kylie is good example aswell if it comes to being positive, she is really a strong woman as she was struck by the horrible disease called cancer. Never let your head hang down, but fight.

It is all very well for me to keep on telling about how great it is to be here, but I must qualify my assertions.

I have always believed if you want to understand your place in the universe you must look at the wide view.
Fundamentally, each of us is just one of nearly seven billion bipedal apes shuffling around on a big spherical rock trying to procure a few basic needs- namely food, shelter, and, if you're lucky, a bit of reproduction.

It looks as though we have achieved these basic requirements rather well and by all accounts most of us are in bloom.
Judging by the number of overly corpulent persons crawling down the streets of the western world, many of us are not flowering at all.

It is a rather telling paradox of our times that our problem is not that we don't have enough to eat; it is that we can't stop shovelling tasty morsels into our gaping mouths.

At no time in the history of civilisation has there been societies where the general population has been so affluent that they have been able to consume all the meat, sugar and carbohydrates to their labouring hearts' content.

Yet we still complain.

Our car is not new enough, taxes are too complex, society is too crime ridden.

Reality check: You have a car. Your taxes bring are wide range of services that have become essential to your life. You probably haven't been a victim of a serious crime recently, and if you have been, just remember you are still here to fight another day. (there are two things we are sure of in this life: death and taxes.)

Let's go back a couple of thousand years and you can be sure that things wouldn't nearly have been so rosy.

Some of your brothers or sisters would have surely died in childhood.

Disease would have been a constant threat.

Running water and functioning sewerage would have been but a distant dream.

And murder a not uncommon practice.

Do you think they sat around the fireplace bitching about issues like whether or not we should put folic acid in our bread?
We are much more unlikely to die a violent death these days than at any time in history. Something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.

In fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are today.

Indeed, violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.

I like the idea of Thanksgiving eventhough there will be thousands of turkey's killed for it.

I don't know exactly who or what we are supposed to thank, maybe God, maybe some exotic religion, maybe your mother, but I think it would be good to spend a day every year reflecting on the fact that our glasses are almost full to overflowing and the little things that send us into apoplectic fits of self-pity and disgust are really just a small beer.

You don't need to wait until this special day of reflection though.

You can do it right now.

Look around you, examine the detail, think of where you have come from and where you are going and if you really get it, if you really, truly understand the situation in which you currently exist, it should blow your freakin' mind.

If you can't climb out of your own reality so easily, but there's a place somewhere in your surrounding that might do the trick.

Surrounded by some pieces of our beautiful nature and if you don't have any kind of happy feelings as you consider your place in the universe you really have been drugged into submission by some dark forces determined to keep you from being happy.

I'm the first to admit that I'm not always the paragon of cheeriness and positivity, but the concept that we are all extremely fortunate to be here is never far from my thoughts.

It is great to be here and I hope you can see that too.

You all enjoy the rest of the summer while I take off to the next door neighbors beautiful country and relax for a few days.

The Old Sailor,