A Soulful Journey

  A doctor who goes into his patient’s hospital room. The doctor says, “Do you want the bad news or the good news first?” The patient says, “Gimme the good news.” The doctor says, “The good news is that you’re going to die in twenty-four hours.” The patient sits up alarmed and says, “If that’s the good news, then what on Earth is the bad news?” The doctor says, “I forgot to call you yesterday.” Life is always an admixture of good news and bad.  We make the  decision  about how we label what happens to us.

Idea: It is good to change as we learn. There’s an old expression that says, “A conservative is a liberal that’s been mugged, and a civil libertarian is a conservative that’s been indicted.” Question: Is it self-centered to develop a world view based solely on the bad things that happen to us?

Why is that we take sides?   Why do people have to choose a party or name for themselves? Or feel compelled to place a label on others? “I often think it’s comical How nature always does contrive That every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!” - Gilbert and Sullivan, “Iolanthe” As usual, the team of Gilbert and Sullivan make fun of the all-too-human proclivity to make trouble for itself.   Instead of taking an issue, mulling it over, and making a decision, we seem to prefer taking sides, choosing to identify “us” against “them”?   Must we?  Why do we continue to identify people so?