Breaking News

There are two realities living side by side today. One is the reality described in the relentlessness of twenty-four/seven media coverage with its partner– social network commentary. The other is the reality of my physical, daily life.

I am struggling to keep these two realities in perspective with each other. In these times I feel my personal, physical life is being absorbed up into the other.The swirling and dark news cycle for the past year has in a way clouded my own perceptions, affecting my own activities. It is time for a correction, and I think the quote below from Frederick Buechners book  “Whistling in the Dark, is a starting place. This was written twenty-two years ago, well before the proliferation of and immediacy of information and comment.

“WHEN THE EVENING NEWS comes on, hundreds of thousands of people all over the earth are watching it on their TV screens or listening to it on their radios. Disasters and scandals, scientific breakthroughs and crimes of passion, perpetual wars and the perpetual search for peace—people sit there by the millions half dazed by the things that go to create each particular day. Maybe they even try to make some kind of sense of it or, if they’re not up to that, at least try to come to some sort of terms with it, try to figure out how it’s apt to affect them for good or ill.

There is also, of course, the news that rarely if ever gets into the media at all, and that is the news of each particular day of each particular one of us. That is the news we’re so busy making that we seldom get around to sitting down and thinking it over. If it takes some extraordinary turn we might, but the unextraordinary, commonplace events of each day as they come along we tend to let slip by almost unnoticed. That is, to put it mildly, a pity. What we are letting slip by almost unnoticed are the only lives on this planet we’re presumably ever going to get.

We’re all of us caught up in our own small wars, both hot and cold. We have our crimes and passions, our failures and successes. We make our occasional breakthroughs. God knows we are searching for peace. It’s all apt to happen so quietly and on so small a scale we hardly realize it’s happening. Only an unanswered letter. A phone conversation. A tone of voice. A chance meeting at the post office. An unexpected lump in the throat. Laughing till we cry. But these things are what it’s all about. These things are what we are all about.

Maybe there’s nothing on earth more important for us to do than sit down every evening or so and think it over, try to figure it out if we can, at least try to come to terms with it. The news of our day. Where it is taking us. Where it is taking the people we love. It is, if nothing else, a way of saying our prayers.”                    Frederic Buechner-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark 1988.

Not everything is urgent to me today. Not everything demands an immediate response. I don’t need to form an opinion on every subject, and I certainly don’t have to offer one. I need to separate myself from the noise of “Breaking News” and impetuous commentary, and pay closer attention to where my feet and my hands are–to what I am doing with them, and who it is that needs them today. That is where my news is breaking.

Kind Regards,

Bob