A conversation with a friend this morning prompted me to pull a book off the shelf that has been sitting there for a couple years, waiting for me to read it. It's Deepak Chopra's The Book of Secrets.
As I was scanning through it, I ran across an exercise where he suggests looking at the news not just as some external source of titillation and entertainment, but as it relates to you. The last in a series of questions he suggests is...
Which part of me does this program stand for? The part that dwells on one problem after another, or the part that wants to find answers?
Since I started this blog, I've been thinking a lot about what kind of positive news really has energy behind it. When I read that question, it occurred to me that one piece of the puzzle is people who focus on finding answers.
The risk with wanting to focus only on positive news is that it's not exclusively a positive world. It's not all light and fluffy and filled with kittens and summertime lemonade stands. There is strife. There are problems. And to ignore them completely is to give up the opportunity to do something about them and create more of the positive.
News about people who encounter those problems and look for answers combines the two realities that exist in the world. Hopelessness and hope. Hate and love. Despair and inspiration. It doesn't let the turmoil exist by itself (which it pretty much does in the mainstream news media), and it doesn't turn a blind eye to the fact that it exists.
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