---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote :
In my local Starbucks this evening I asked one of the staff where one of the regular customers had gone. Peter - a Scot who was there almost every night - was always very boisterous and friendly so his absence was noticeable. I was expecting to be told that he had decided to move back to Edinburgh. Instead I learned that he'd killed himself by throwing himself in front of a train at Ealing Broadway station (right next door to the Starbucks). Naturally enough I was thunderstruck. You then start to think if you had been as welcoming to him as maybe you should have been. We all owe each other a certain acknowledgment and respect and I was thinking back to my own nodded greetings and occasional exchanges with Peter and judging that perhaps I'd fallen short of giving him his due. R.I.P. Sad story but don't feel bad, if he was generally friendly then a bit more human contact would be unlikely to have affected those deeply hidden demons. But I guess we always blame ourselves a bit when something like that happens to someone we know. The only person that really knows what's going on inside is the sufferer. And what can we do if they hide it well? Anyway, there was a staff member I'd noticed who always struck me as being a bright young chap. I thought that maybe he was one of those over-qualified graduates one reads about who are so desperate for work experience that cleaning up at a coffee shop has people queuing up around the block whenever a vacancy arises. Tonight I'd been sitting there reading Sam Harris's Waking Up (many thanks to those FFLifers who recommended the title - I'd probably not have bought it without your thumbs up). This staffer said to me that it seemed an interesting topic - "Spirituality without Religion". What was it about? So I summed it up by saying that Sam Harris was hostile to religion - and I mean really hostile - but he approved of meditation and wanted to encourage its use while ditching all the metaphysical baggage. My staffer then responded by saying that he never read books. I tell you that his reply was more shocking to me than the news of Peter's suicide. It really hit me that someone who never reads books must have an overall view of life utterly remote from my own. How can an obviously bright and personable young man have gone through our educational system and ended up deciding that books have nothing worthwhile for him? Imagine what it must be like to have your worldview formed by television, the internet and your friends' chat. What a confined space you must live in. Maybe not, if he's on facebook then he probably gets a varied diet of poorly informed science, mystical dribblings and intense opinion. No worse than most religious people get and enough to know that there's a world outside of his immediate experience. No substitute of course... It'd be good if we got taught at school to evaluate things properly so at least we can assess likelihoods of other people's beliefs. I know someone who educates himself on world events via Youtube polemics. When you think about what sort of world he must live in it's scary because we take our personally trusted sources as given's. He believes that the world is run by giant lizards from outer space for crissakes. Apparently these alien lizards are in cahoots with the NSA and pay for their nefarious genetic human interbreeding programme by running the world drugs trade. It's a much more exciting world than mine, all I have to worry about is my savings being wiped out by inflation.
