| If you read the news, it feels like the world is falling apart. Political incompetence. Political corruption. Political violence. Rising crime. Depressing economic news. The future looks dark. People seem awful. Nothing seems calm. Everything seems high stakes. And worse, it's happening near you. Are you in danger? Should you be scared? Is there really nothing you can do about it? In the hilarious book In A Sunburned Country (you can grab at the Painted Porch), Bill Bryson speaks of the joy of reading the news in Australia, a country many thousands of miles from his own. "It always amazes me how seldom visitors bother with local paper," he writes, "I personally can think of nothing more exciting, certainly nothing you could do in a public place with a cup of coffee than to read newspapers from a part of the world you know almost nothing about. What a comfort it is to find a nation preoccupied by matters of no possible consequence to oneself. I love reading about scandals involving ministers of whom I have never heard, murder hunts in communities whose names sound dusty and remote, features on revered artists and thinkers whose achievements have never reached my ears, whose talents I must take on faith." What he was experiencing, of course, was the wonder of perspective.He was taking Plato's View, the 10,000-foot view, the one that Marcus Aurelius talks about in Meditations. Two armies battling each other is a horrible thing up close. From the top of a mountain, it looks like ants going after a piece of food. News near us is alarming, frustrating, disappointing. News from far away is funny, absurd, riveting. The turmoil of Ancient Rome provides us moral lessons…the turmoil of our own time simply makes us queasy. Bryson, who no doubt had problems with politicians at home, noted the hilarity of two feuding Australian ministers who were literally named Abbott and Costello. And us reading about all this in the pages of a great book makes it an even calmer affair, considering it was written more than two decades ago. Indeed, this is what history does as well (like The Storm Before the Storm)—it allows us to understand the present by way of the distant past. The point is: How we look at things matters. And sometimes by noticing how we might look at something while we're on vacation or through the lens of foreign language or culture or a history book, can give us a better insight into how we might better look at things back home or right now. Zoom out. Take a sideways glance. Get the outside of the issue, the problem, the day's events. Seek perspective. With a different view on things, you may not feel like the world is falling apart. Instead, you may see things are pretty similar to how they've always been. By the way, I'm giving speeches in Sydney on July 31st and Melbourne on August 1st (that's why I was reading Bryson again). I'll also be checking out some international news in anticipation of the talks I am giving in Toronto, Vancouver, London, Dublin and Rotterdam in November. You can come see me at some wonderful venues and ask questions and all that. Ticket info at ryanholiday.net/tour And if you missed it, here is a video of Robert Greene and I on stage in Los Angeles back in 2023.  |
