Whinging poms

There’s some documentary on television solely of British women complaining about the inconveniences of modern conveniences. “Too many electronic devices to charge.” “Too many PINs to remember.” “Too many answering machines and e-mails to check.” For God’s sake people… No-one is forcing you to buy any of these things. Just because they happen to be on the market, if it’s all too complicated for you, you really don’t have to buy them. If you want an iPod or a video camera or a mobile phone, yes you need a charger for it. If you want 14 different credit cards, you need to remember the PINs for them. If you want an answering machine, you have to check the messages. Make up your minds if you want them, and deal with it! You don’t have to go and complain about it to try to convince everyone else that these mundane things are really that much of a burden and that life is ‘just too hard’. Not sure what they yabbered on about after that because it was too frustrating despite my efforts to give them a hearing ear.

Feeling insignificant?

One of the fundamental parts of being human is to feel needed. An extension of this desire is to feel that we are important on some broader universal scale. This is largely the purpose of religion – to make people feel as though there is something beyond the basic biological and social constructs that exist in the physical world. But what is often lost in trying to reach this unreachable and intangible goal is the importance of what we have – indeed what we are. Look around you… Recognize the beauty and value in the people and things that are here now. Let the people who are important to you know it. As far as the universe is concerned, we are all pretty insignificant, so there is no point trying to examine ourselves from that perspective. Keep sight of what humanity is, what it can become, and what we can do to improve it, instead of trying to place it into a framework that detracts from its meaning. This doesn’t mean limiting our thoughts or imaginations, or denying spirituality, but just keeping things in context.