Good Omens?
Terry Pratchett’s brilliant book “Good Omens” (if you haven’t read it, do, it’s very clever and laugh out loud funny) is about the apocalypse that went wrong. The Child of Satan is accidentally given to the wrong couple who live like an Enid Blyton story where he grows up in blissful ignorance of who he is supposed to be. Satan, never a happy chappie at the best of times, is furious and sends demons to find him. One such demon is Crowley who fancies himself as a modern thinking demon and who is frustrated by the elaborate and showy acts of evil that the old school demons are so attached to.
Crowley’s approach is much subtler. He is responsible for, amongst other things; temporary phone outages, child proof medicine bottles, VAT, the M25 and traffic lights that stick on red.
His theory is that if you create enough low grade bed feeling, resentment and anger people will simply pass it on; come home in a bad mood, shout at the kids, kick the cat, gesticulate at a driver or two and so it gets passed on. Pretty soon you have an undercurrent of low-grade yet persistent negativity spreading like wild fire.
The concept and the writing are brilliant and yet this is what happens, isn’t it? Something like this perhaps…
You have a bad day. A traffic jam means that you are late for a meeting and you can’t let them know because you can’t get a good phone signal while you sit seething in the traffic. Regardless which lane you are in the other lanes go faster than you and other cars zoom past while you sit motionless. When you get there, you rush and trip up the step to the building, No Worse! The receptionist (who looks about sixteen with a mildly bored air about her) sees you and makes a poor job of stifling a laugh. When you finally get in to the meeting, which is a step in the interview process for a job you really want, one of the panel is the man that you cut in front of to get to the petrol pump when you finally got of the motorway. You cringe.
Although all of this could be classed as just a series of “first world problems” rather than the catalogue of disasters that feel they are, you chew on this sequence of events as you drive home. By the time you get home your mood has far from improved so when your partner says “How did it go”, you have steam coming out of your ears and reply “How the *** do you think it went?!!” You pass your mood on to them; they pass it on to the kids or to friends or even to the dog. And so it spreads
I’m not saying that all our problem are trivial and we never experience real adversity, because we do. The thing is that while such events are undeniably horrendous when they do happen there is some strange way in which this adversity brings us together in a way that the chip, chip, chip of background nastiness, angry outbursts and indifference don’t. They leave us disconnected and ready to retaliate with our own one finger salute or whatever response we think will create maximum impact.
Our brains are wired to scan the horizon to check for any potential threat. It’s one of the many features of our brains that has kept us alive and thriving and also means that we will, by default, pick up on the negative more readily than the positive and take it personally (the lights haven’t really gone to red specifically to make you late, even if sometimes it feels like they have). One relatively minor event in the morning can be interpreted as a bad omen for the rest of the day. Happily, because of the way that other parts of our brain works this does not have to always be the case, and our brains also like to find things that are similar to each other so if you consciously focus on positive events, on the small but good things that happen your very clever brain will seek out more and more of them and an act of kindness can become just as contagious.
Big gestures of kindness are great, volunteering, fund raising, charity events all really positive stuff, and it doesn’t always have to be that big to make a difference. The chip, chip, chip effect of negativity works the same in reverse. One small act at a time you can change the mood and mind-set of another person, a group, a town, a country, a planet. Starting a spiral in the opposite direction is incredibly simple; wave someone out at a junction, say thank you, pick up a piece of litter and put it in a bin (yes, I know you didn’t drop it but the place you are in would be so much better if it wasn’t there) it really is that easy to start to turn the tide of negativity. The golden rule of “Do unto other as you would have them do unto you” has been around for years. All we need to do is act on it.
