A friend said,"I want some good news!"
It seems to me that this desire is both a philosophical/religious one and a communication one.
Say that your cousin emails you that she has been thinking of you and would like to get together for breakfast. That is good news in itself. Unless of course, you have been dreading that request. Of course, it is possible that you have breakfast with her and talk nicely together. That would be a good accomplishment and it would good internal news that you did that well. Maybe you find that you do have good news with her request and with the actual breakfast and with the pride you take in conducting yourself well but, sadly, it is not enough. You still itch for good news, for more good news and for good news to keep on flowing to you.
At this point, I have to ask if you have been meditating. See, it seems to me that you haven't been. As animals trapped in wiring that is thousands of years old, we are programmed to seek pleasure and avoid pain. We want more and more pleasure in all forms and less and less pain. Meditation and some reading of Pema Chodron, the American grandmother who is a grand dame of a Canadian Buddhist abbey, and some Chang-Meng Tan, the Google jolly good fellow [Honestly, that is his title among others], Sylvia Boorstein, Jack Kornfield and Dan Harris, you can stay on the path of acceptance of your nature. You can see that you crave this and that and that sometimes you will get what you crave but often you will not.
You can go into an adolescent funk over not getting your way if you want, but it is better to smirk knowingly about internal messages that demand every day be peachy and no days be negatives ones. Maybe you remember Kipling's advice: "if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, you will be a man, my son friend." If you can keep your intention to forebear the daily downs and celebrate the daily ups, skies, rain, penalties, unexpected good fortune and continuous electrical power delivered to your house, you will have plenty of good news.
