Really, how much time do you spend thinking about wars in the Middle East? And, if you're not traveling by air, about terrorist threats?

Do your thoughts and words affect either in any way? They affect you, though. They affect how you feel.

Do you have a choice in policy? Recognizing our limitations to influence wars frees us to experience the joy available to us in our daily lives. Focusing on war simply attracts misery. There's enough of that going on everywhere. Think about any big war in history. Except for the people actually doing the fighting and those who happen to be in the location of the battles, the world's inhabitants went about their daily business in peace. And they were by far the majority. If they had little or no news, they were, most likely, unconcerned about the war.

If you watch regular television news this century you cannot feel much joy. However, you can feel joy watching a kitten stalk a hummingbird.

If you argue politics over dinner you don't notice the flavor of the lemon-caper sauce on your poached salmon.

I admit there's fun in a good argument, and I know that fear is excitement's first cousin. Why else would snakes on a plane be entertaining? I'm just suggesting that we need to be careful about what we invite into our lives unwittingly by focusing on the worse things going on in the world that television news happily provides and ignoring the other 95% of the pleasantries that surround us.

Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi Indian word meaning "life out of balance". Acupuncture is an ancient medical practice for restoring balance in the body's flow of energy.

Aristotle advocates balance between extremes.

EFT, Emotional Freedom Technique, combines the emotional power of words with acupressure on the body to restore any part of your life that feels out of balance.

Acupuncturists have been saying for years that stimulating key acupuncture points improves the body’s flow of energy for optimum health. According to University of Michigan researchers, do-it-yourself acupressure can keep students awake in class without caffeine or high-sugar snacks. Their results were reported in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.

But the student alertness study used only physical stimulation. Students tapped on the tops of their heads and on their legs, feet, and hands for several minutes at a time. Practitioners of EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), which combines acupressure tapping with focused thought, report significant results for not only mental alertness but relief from pain, stress, anxiety, phobias, and other problems.

EFT’s basic premise is that the underlying cause of every negative emotion and almost every physical symptom is a disruption of the body’s energy flow along the same meridians that were mapped over 4,000 years ago by Chinese physicians.

Acupuncturists use needles to stimulate key points along the meridians but in EFT they tap on these points. Tapping requires less precision, so it’s easy for almost anyone, including children, to get good results.

Reports from EFT practitioners from around the world describe people using it for the first time for pain, impaired range of motion, stress, phobias, physical symptoms, test anxiety, sports performance problems, or other conditions. All report significant improvement.

Complete instructions are provided in the free EFT Manual, which over 300,000 have downloaded from the EFT website. Another 10,000 download it each month. The manual, which has been translated by volunteer practitioners into nine languages, explains everything one needs to know in order to try EFT. It can be freely downloaded at http://www.emofree.com/downloadeftmanual.asp

It’s so simple it really tests your credulity. It's an amazing manual. Print it out. I had it on my desktop for a month, barely reading it until I printed it. Good news, for a change.

It's is hard to be simple, yet it is so important to pare down to simple things like kittens in perfect balance as they stalk hummingbirds.