Thursday, May 27, 2004

Snap Out Of It

"you never gave life a chance
you've got to give life a chance..."

We programme ourselves as we go on, and perhaps I've been concentrating too much on the negative aspects of my personality. When I say I'm sad, I reinforce my sadness, instead of getting out of it. When I say I feel a bit psychotic, it's easy for me to modify my behaviour to that slightly "crazy" mode, and therefore start to act "strange" (and the notion of strangeness always depends on the outside observer, who may not know all the facts, reasons and motivations behind and leading to the other person's seemingly peculiar behaviour).

Maybe it was time for a bit more positive programming, as hard as it might be under the current circumstances. These days it's difficult to find too many rays of hope, if you keep following closely newspapers and other media: it's like we were living in the age of steel, fire and blood. Every day we hear about more atrocities committed in the holy names of "patriotism" and "religion". We are undergoing a drastic climate change; the glaciers are melting, the ozone layer is getting thinner; all over the world floods, heavy storms and drought, affecting the lives of millions of people; and politicians, following slavishly in the leash of economy and profit-making, unwilling to change anything of it. And what about the globalisation, domestic unemployment, firms kicking out their employees nearly every day in order to just keep their balances right...? Even in such rare case one does not have personal problems in one's own life, it's easy to be a pessimist.

There is a grave danger that this will eventually lead to resignation and cynicism, reinforcing negative programming, but this should be perceived merely as tunnelvision. Because we can make a conscious decision to "snap out of it". And the biggest task at hand there can be is to find out how to "snap".

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