Well put.

One of the great things about being able to read is the opportunity to 'soak up' others thoughts and experiences whenever and wherever you are. Coming from a 'reading culture' we often don't realise just how much we are learning all the time, but for millions of people around the world they are not in a position to do this.

One example of this 'self learning' is when you come across someone who has expressed thoughts and feelings similar to your own in a way that helps you to process and develop your own thinking further. Mark, a friend and colleague of ours now working in western-Tanzania, has done just that in his recent blog entitled 'Economic Crisis?'. Reflecting on the ongoing economic crisis in light of his daily experiences in Tanzania, Mark begins to unpack some of the kinds of thoughts that have been rattling around my head recently:

"News of economic bailouts and financial crises in Europe seem a little strange to me here in rural Tanzania. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there is something incongruous about extremely rich people dressed in nice clothes discussing how to preserve the banking system and stave off financial collapse, when our friends around us here in Mpanda are blissfully unaware as they work hard to harvest their crops and earn money to buy a plot of land and build a small house for their family. 

So what exactly is the crisis? Is it that people are starving, or being persecuted, or being denied access to basic healthcare? Not generally, no.... 

I think more fundamentally the crisis is in our belief that if we all act selfishly (with regard to economics as well as in life in general), accumulating as much as possible for ourselves, then the market (or the laws of the universe) will take care of the rest and everything will be rosy. If this entire paradigm is seen to be failing, then we must re-examine the fundamental assumption that greed and selfishness make the world go round. We may well call that a crisis." [Read the whole blog here.]

That may sound a little harsh, but underlying many of our decisions we may be surprised (or aghast even) to find that selfishness–the belief that really I deserve to be put first, that I'm owed something–drives many, if not most, of our decision making. As Mark says, when those deep seated but unspoken attitudes are put at risk, suddenly nothing is certain.

So, thinking more personally, where do you feel you are at crisis in your life at the moment? What do you think is really being challenged under the observable, surface-level features? And what are the positive changes that you might need to make to address this area?