steaming shower

November 6, 2010

An article by Tony Wright in The Sydney Morning Herald today caught our eye. The article begins “The apparently mundane doesn’t impress us whether it’s a successful plane journey, hot water on tap or a successful immigrant. The shower threw steaming water into the dawn a the twist of a tap, just as it does every morning; a flick of the light switch rolled away the dark, as always. The kettle boiled and there was tea; toast leapt from the toaster.”

The point of the article is that news focuses on things that go wrong. Like the Quantas jet engine failure. “We could hardly find headlines big enough to report the shock and the horror.”

We at the DMC have long thought the same as Wright — a strange feature of the human  condition is attention is paid when something goes awry instead of to all the astonishing things that go well day in and day out, that emotional reactions are drawn to the extraordinary while the ordinary goes unnoticed.

Click here to read the article.