MONDAYS ARE FOR YELLING!

Here is another great talk on TED.com:

Dan Pallotta: The way we think about charity is dead wrong | Video on TED.com


On one hand, I hear what you are saying Dan.
Perspective is key and much of our perspective is antiquated and obsolete.  If we want to really get the money in the right places, and in real amounts, then we really do need to look at this more realistically.


On the other hand, even though more money is being raised, are results being made?  Is more money equal to a path to a better life?  Are the problems that many of our Charities speak about taking on, really solvable with the methods they fund?

Are breast cancer research and the charities that support them, focused on a cure or a cause.  Maybe both, that would make the most sense.  Why is cancer, all kinds of cancer, so prevalent?  What are we doing that is making it so, or has it always been so.  Was cancer always so prominent a cause of death?

The idea of curing cancer makes each of use feel better, for our own benefit, but since we are each going to die of something, sometime, wouldn't removing the cause of cancer be a benefit to all people from here on out, say our children perhaps, and thus make us feel even better?  Maybe we all don't agree with this perspective, maybe we only have concern for what affects our own lives.

So many of our troubles can or could be avoided by not doing something in the first place.  So many of the things we sign on for are simply because of convention, or, for lack of real consideration of the thing we sign on for.  This is called convenience sometimes and we even have neighborhood stores where we can by it, but it is provided for us everywhere.

I want to ask the questions that all follow one after another and then end up leading to the question, "Have you accepted your own mortality?"  and then to "How much life is enough, how many years of living are enough?" and then "Are the number of years as important as the quality of life that is lived?"

It seems to always come back to numbers, dollars, years, things.....

When we have little control over the number of years of our lives, why is it that we don't instead focus on the quality of the time we have?  Many would argue that we do try to have good lives, but that we also try to have as much time in these lives as we can.  I have come to believe that if we spend our time even with only one eye on the clock, we will miss out on what is in front of us now.  The eye that was watching the clock might miss the oncoming bus that kills us.

On the other hand, just to end on an upbeat, have you ever seen the movie "Stranger than Fiction"?  In this case the eye on the watch allowed for the bus (and to save a life) and the bus allowed for a good death, and then, to live a good life.