Looking for the Good News

As the northern hemisphere slowly drifts towards the dark days of November - when the air will feel cold and damp, the sun will hide for days behind wet clouds full of rain or even snow and the trees having lost all of their summer green leaves will stand starkly against the dull sky - it is so tempting to withdraw into a cocoon, to hibernate until those first warm rays of spring sun reach our souls. This tendency to hide from the reality of our lives is further encouraged by the paucity of almost any news that would encourage a smile, a sense that maybe, just maybe everything will turn out just fine.

The local, provincial, national or international news is almost all discouraging, For every tiny bit of almost good news, there is a long litany of bad news that could easily overwhelm all but the most optimistic of us. So many of our political structures are changing - at either end of the country we have provincial governments that are being operated by the slimmest margins of control with that control resting with a party that won only three seats (Green Party in both New Brunswick and B.C hold the balance of power); there is a government in Ontario that is frightening in its capacity to be self centered in its drive to reduce costs and to support those whose primary goal is to maintain their status quo; there will be a provincial government in Alberta next year who promises to make the same mistakes other governments have made in the past and all of the provinces blame the Federal government for not doing more, not listening more, not giving them more money.

We have a national government in Ottawa that may have a vision of how to deal with such issues as climate change but lack the capacity to convince anyone else to agree to it and therefore on even good days appear as if they are, at best, people who do not know what they are doing. They are a government who perhaps through design or even more likely, a lack of design have created issues such as the pipeline debate that pits people of diametrically opposite points of view against each other - ensuring that at least one of the sides will feel unsatisfied.

Internationally it is a zoo, not just because of the buffoon sitting in the White House (who somewhat embarrassingly for all Americans was giggled at the UN on Tuesday)¸ Europe continues to struggle with the number of refugees pouring over their borders and Britain tries to find a graceful way out of the European alliance. The Middle East continues to present political paradoxes for which solutions seem impossible to even fantasize about and Asia is dominated by economic China that seems frequently to be either tottering towards an economic crash or achieving true world domination.

It feels as if the world is literally falling apart with huge islands of plastic floating in our oceans and year after year the storms coming off of the oceans are worse. It is hard to find much to cheer about when some scientist are suggesting that we need to start thinking about moving to Mars or some other much further away planet because this one is not going to last much (relatively speaking) longer.


But there is good news out there and we need to look for it, to hang on to it and to share it with other people. Example: A few months ago, while I was at one of the Farmer's Markets, a young couple came up, looked at my rugs and finally bought one. They told me that they were getting married the next weekend and wanted one of my rugs to stand on when they exchanged their vows. I was pleased to sell them one. Last weekend, the young lady came up to me and asked if I remembered her - I did and we talked a bit about the wedding. She showed me a picture of the two of them, on my rug exchanging vows.

It was a wonderful picture . It is a small thing - but it made me feel good. And we all need every little bit of things that make us feel good - especially those things that connect us to other people.