Goodbye 2003. You tried your best but, rugby aside, you weren’t a vintage year. It was the year of war in Iraq and earthquake in Iran; the year when both Vladimir Putin and George Bush paid state visits to Britain, reminding us how much the political landscape has changed, but also of violence in Zimbabwe and terror in Istanbul, reminding us how much has stayed the same. May saw the Road Map to peace in the Middle East, but it also saw the publication of a road map of London printed upside down, with south at the top, presumably for the benefit of people who see the world upside-down.
And – do you know – perhaps we do.
I have a little experiment I sometimes do when giving a lecture on happiness. I hold up a sheet of blank paper with a black dot in the middle and ask people what they see. They say: a black dot. I then point out that the dot is less than one per cent of the page. What they’ve missed is the ninety-nine per cent of the paper that’s clear and clean.
Which is why the bad news is news while the good news rarely is. We’re genetically conditioned to notice things that are odd, discrepant, out of place. The very fact that we notice the bad tells us that we are surrounded by good. It’s just that we don’t notice it, the way we don’t notice the clear paper around the black dot. If good news ever became news, then we’d have reason to worry.
So this year, why not try seeing the world the right way up. Go somewhere without your mobile phone. Watch children in a park kicking up the leaves and remember what the world once looked like when you were that age, and know that it hasn’t changed; why then should you? When you’re caught in a traffic jam, smile. It’ll cheer you up, infuriate everyone else, and remind you that humour is always more human than rage. Next time you’re bombarded by advertisements telling you what you don’t yet have, remind yourself of what you do: the sheer miracle that we are here, the world is here, and we have the privilege to see it.
Breathe and let the stillness of the turning world steal over you. Remember that not the least of God’s creative acts was to see the world, that it is good. Or as W. H. Auden put it in a lovely line: ‘In the prison of his days, teach the free man how to praise.’
