One of the clever Sunday school teachers I had as a child gave her class of 5-year-olds plastic bowls, and sent us to a table on the other side of the room to fill our bowls. On the table were some nice things: flowers, pine cones, feathers; and some bad things: crumpled old paper, lint, and what-not.
The point was, of course, "fill your bowl with nice things" - the bowl being your mind, and the table being your choice of what to think about and watch.
The excercise would be dopey, except that it was directed at 5-year-olds, for whom the transition from not putting lint in your mouth to not putting it in your cottony head runs down a short, clear path. But I can't help watching adults import news-related angst into their lives, to no purpose, without thinking that, folks, if you can't handle the news, and you're not involved in what's covered, you're actually better off, sad to say, with the childish lesson of bowls and feathers and lint.
