Nothing is certain anymore! Just watched the news of a train accident in Russia. The train from St. Petersburg to Moscow crashed, many dead more wounded. Is it a surprise that more and more people feel uncertain and are afraid to travel by train, car, plane or do anything that ‘clearly’ brings a risk of death or injury. So what to do? Stay at home, purchase the most expensive cable TV subscription, get broadband internet and get your shopping done on line?
Let’s have a real look at the facts!
It is very true that accidents can happen and they often happen completely unexpectedly AND THERE IS NO ACCIDENT PROOF WAY OF LIFE. Now hold on a second I can hear you think, of course accidents can be prevented, just take more care!!! Well, of course we can prevent accidents by taking more care, but taking more care can cause accidents as well. For example if we have a state of the art burglar prevention system in our house, this could result in giving the impression that we have a lot of wealth to safe-guard, which may attract real experienced and ‘competent’ burglars who can circumvent our state of the art system. Or when crossing a busy road, if we look left very carefully we may miss the car coming from the right….It is virtually impossible to lead a life that is 100% safe, with a guarantee for no mishaps. Fact two is that most of the time we are safe: trains, planes, boats and cars are very safe methods of transport. I can see you really getting riled up now and wanting to tell me that the news really do report more accidents than in ‘THEM GOOD OLD DAYS’. This is very true, but this is caused by the many 24 hours a day news stations we have. In them good old days we had two news bulletins per day and the above mentioned train crash would be reported on two perhaps three consecutive days (= a maximum of six times). The 24 hours news programmes often have cycle of 30 minutes, so they would report it 2* per hour and over three days that is 144 times…We get exposed to the same accident each time we watch the news. Also, because of the 24 hours news programmes and the fact that there really is no interesting news 24 hour per day, more and more smaller accidents get reported, sometimes in dramatic ways, giving us the impression that life is very unsafe.
Many people with anxiety problems who either worry too much or are very obsessed with the need for safety point to the growing frequency in the news of bad things happening. They are often surprised that the actual incidence of accidents has not changed that much! the next step is to accept that doing life is in fact learning to live with uncertainty!