Forecasts

For some reason, William decided to get up at 3 am this morning which almost made me regret not doing the Ultra Interval Challenge once again now on the right day and everything. But instead of running another set of 8 x 10 km, I am reading about the renaissance of smaller cities in Monocle Forecast while eating a “lussekatt”. From Itoshima to Innsbruck and then onwards to Porto, I definitely get the allure even as megacities like Seoul or New York have a charm of their own.

In so many ways, the world is really what we want to see even as the things we ignore have a nasty habit of coming back to haunt us. Writing about Obama’s new memoir, Fareed Zakaria points out that Obama for the most part ignores the “rise of an enraged, utterly obstructionist, Manichean opposition to his presidency, and himself personally, that eventually culminated in the election of Donald Trump”. Fareed thinks Obama’s reason for this omission is “that it would take him into deep and dark waters that are so different from the hopeful, optimistic country he so plainly wants to believe in”. While I still have to read Obama's memoirs myself, I think there is a lot of truth to this and, to some extent, I find it to be profoundly sound.

In one of the latest episodes of Discovery, Captain Saru makes a reference to the Italian 14th century painter Giotto and how his three dimensional paintings made people look up after the Dark Ages. More than ever, we similarly need to look to the future and try to see the best in each other rather than letting our fears control our world.