I have no attention span so I recognize this trait in others easily. It is easy to see , not requiring patient observation nor any real listening skills. All one has to do today is pick up the newspaper or sit down and listen to the business news. Last week most financial  experts on Bloomberg or CNN told us very clearly that the economic downturn was a thing of the past. It was a great time to jump back into the market. There were many opportunities to make money and we should all  “believe in the future of our great country.” I listened to these announcements with a low level rage that surprised me. I kept thinkng of the many people out there who had lost everything in the market or in their 401 K’s and how their lives had changed. I thought of all the families who were unable to buy food  or pay for their kids to go to college. There are so many things to listen to now that are sad and hopeless. So many retired folks who thought they had saved enough to see themselves through a comfortable retirement and are too old to return to work. I agree it might have been tempting to believe in the words of these financial experts and jump back into the market. What fun it would be to put quarters in a slot machine and know it was going to pay off each time you did. I wanted to believe in this positive news as well but something told me not to so I didn’t. Today the market lost most of the gains of the past month and I bet it will keep falling for the rest of the year. I wish the people who report the news would report the uncertainty of the stock market and the world economy so people who should save their money would do so. I wish we had more attention span for pain and frustration. I wish we would all become more Buddhist in  our thinking and in our living. I wish the Peace Corps would start a reverse osmosis and people from underdeveloped nations would send some of their citizens here to teach us to grow beans and rice and live simply with little to distract us from our daily tasks at hand.Wouldn’t it be interesting if we stopped watching television and started reading again or took up knitting? Or what if we went out in our neighborhoods and knocked on doors and invited people over to our homes for a meal? What would happen if we decided to break apart the “culture of loneliness” written about by a few sociologists by organizing groups of people who live right near us and building new support systems? Leonardo da Vinci built machines that no one had dreamed of and no one built in his lifetime yet he drew up endless plans of the future. What if we began right now building our own social systems that were based on the universal idea of love and acceptance and care of those who couldn’t care for themselves? What if we made it our duty to bring  joy into someones life on a daily basis? What if we just smiled at a few people each day? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?