> I was pretty pissed yesterday when I found out that the lens may be > irrepairable (but a second tech is going to give it a shot), but after > ruminating overnight, I awoke this morning, and realized "hell, it's > ~just~ a lens!" > > People are starving in the third world, we seem to be slowly lurching > towards a war, the homeless are literally freezing to death on the > sidewalks and alleys of our city as we are heading into the second week > of the coldest spell of weather we've seen in a couple of years. > >And, I sit here in my warm apartment, with all the comforts I need, > including loads of cameras and lenses, and I'm pissed? Nah, it's just a > lens.
Frank, You know, I hate to sound all trite and sentimental, but this sort of thinking really changed my life. I was in a supermarket one day a number of years ago. I was a single parent, trying to raise a small child alone, hold down a job, pay all the bills, do all the shopping, cooking, cleaning, laundry and so forth all by myself, and man, let me tell you, I was in a foul mood. I did _not_ want to be in the supermarket, I did _not_ want to have to shop, I did _not_ want to have to cook when I got home--I was feeling sorry for myself, put-upon, and resentful as hell. I was feeling foul and mean. Well, for no reason that I can fathom, it suddenly occurred to me that only a very small proportion of the world's total population has the luxury of walking into a fully-stocked modern supermarket and walking out with essentially anything that strikes their fancy, as I could do. I swear I looked around that supermarket like I was seeing it for the first time--seeing it the way an unemployed worker from Ukraine would see it, or a Pakistani peasant, or an Egyptian slumdweller, or whatever. It would be wealth, riches, plenty. Over the next weeks and months, I just started to think more and more about how most of the world lives, and how ridiculous it is for me to be unsatisfied, resentful, envious, greedy, acquisitive, jealous, and bad-tempered. Hell, medieval _kings_ lived in drafty, cold stone palaces and had to shit in buckets in the corner, and they had such poor medical care that they died in what we call middle age. I live better than those kings. Well, more comfortably, in any event. (It's true I can't have my enemies beheaded.) I don't know what it is, but I think of stuff like this all the time now. It's totally changed my attitude. I think this is the idea behind cognitive therapy... --Mike
