3 things I’ve learnt from watching the world

Why fear doesn't help and other observations.

It is now 36 years since Anwar Sadat became the first Arab leader to visit Israel. The particular significance for me is that this is the first historical event I remember seeing unfold. I watched TV as they showed the plane parked on the runway, awaiting the walk down the steps, with very little idea of why this was important.

Things had happened before I was born, the assassination of President Kennedy, World War II, the Black Death, and things had happened after I was born that I don’t remember, the breakup of the Beatles, Watergate, the 3 day week, but Sadat coming off the plan was first thing I remember for myself.

This means that I now have over 1/3 of a century of experience of seeing world events develop with no-one knowing how it’s going to turn out. Together with a History degrees worth of study of what went before I can offer the following observations about the world:

1: Amazing things happen that you don’t expect. In my life I have seen three amazing transformations; the fall of the iron curtain, the end of Apartheid and the end of the troubles in Northern Ireland. None of these changes has resulted in any kind of utopia but in all these cases they were seen as unending intractable states that if they were ever going to change it would only be through unimaginable bloodshed. Instead change came in unexpected ways beyond our best hopes.

2: The things we fear aren't what actually happens. I grew up wondering each New Year if this was the last one, if by next year we’d all be dead in nuclear war, but the war never came. And then Aids was going to going to kill everyone, but it didn't. There was definitely going to be too many people and not enough food. And it didn't work out like that, at least not yet. If we think about the things we have feared most in our lives, very few of them have ever actually come true.

3: The bad things that have come have been unexpected. 9/11 is the obvious example but not the only one. Aids didn't end up killing half my friends, but it has still had a devastating effect and no one in the 1970’s had the possibility of anything like that on their radar. And then there’s the tsunami, which was not only unpredicted but actually unpredictable.

The lesson from this is simple; fear doesn't help you because what you fear is unlikely to be what happens, the bad things that come will come out of the blue, and never underestimate the way amazing things can happen in ways you least expect.