Factfulness

I remember teaching from Hans Rosling, professor of international health, about how we score worse than chimpanzees in answering global trends. Not terrible enough? Gosh, that's worse than random. In spite of the hard fact that people living in extreme poverty has halved over the last 20 years, more than 90 percent of online polls perceived that the extreme poverty rate has either doubled or remained more or less the same.

In short, we don't see how things are getting better.

What exactly, then, leads us astray in getting a correct worldview? Our negativity instinct. That's an instinct to notice the bad more than the good.

It turns out that I'm not immune to such instinct. I assure you, because I had made the same mistake yesterday, that humans are more likely to notice the dips than the overall improvement. I was reminiscing the "good old days" with my nurse friend. Little did I know that we were quite tempted to glorify our early experience: our instinct to feel that we were much more competent than our colleagues nowadays. This perception, luckily, too often is an illusion.

Shakespeare

It's hard for me to relive the experience of the Globe Theatre, and it's easy to see why. That was an open-air theatre in which William Shakespeare drew huge audiences four hundred years ago.

And I did, pretty much recently, turning page after page of the novel How to Stop Time, following the footsteps of its narrator Tom Hazard who had hardly aged a day. He wasn't allowed to join Facebook because "there isn't the option of putting 1581 for your birthday." Tom brought me (and his lute) back to the noisy stinky theatre when Elizabethans didn't bath very often. I ended up learning a bit of British history.

Yet none of that matters until I joined my daughter's school field trip this morning. That's a workshop to learn the Shakespearean society through language and sonnets.

I liked it.

And I just thought, really, honestly, how remarkably the instructor turned every sentence into teachable moment. The way children learned idioms coined by Shakespeare. The way children made rhythmic sentences out of pentameter pattern. The way my daughter rushed to read Romeo and Juliet after school.

Thy life's a miracle.