KEY POINTS:
When I read the lead headline in Tuesday's edition, "He had a gun in his right hand and a child in his left", I realised, finally and irrevocably, that as a society we have lost it.
The feeling had been growing lately as, day after day, we have been confronted with more and more evidence: a young policewoman beaten to a pulp by a teenager; a pregnant 14-year-old caught twice driving a vehicle while four and five times over the legal alcohol limit.
And that's just a fraction of it. Day after day the newspapers, television and radio spew forth doom and gloom, recording not only murder and mayhem and societal chaos, but also predicting an economic apocalypse.
It seems to me that the prevailing sense in this nation today is a sense of disorder and that the authorities whose sacred duty it is to protect us from ourselves and others - the Government, the police, the courts - are powerless.
So I found myself in sympathy with the former Polish rebel turned president, Lech Walesa, who once declared: "What is difficult today is to censor one's own thoughts - to sit by and see the blind man on the sightless horse, riding into the bottomless abyss."
Nevertheless, I decided to make an effort to censor my thoughts, so I called to mind the words of the first verse of a hymn written by an American churchman, Johnson Oatman Jr, back in the late 1800s and called Count Your Blessings:
When upon life's billows
You are tempest tossed,
When you are discouraged
Thinking all is lost,
Count your many blessings
Name them one by one,
And it will surprise you
What the Lord hath done.
I realised, first, that while I, personally, am not being tempest tossed on life's billows - and nor, probably, are most New Zealanders - I am certainly discouraged and beginning to think all might be lost.
So I began to count my blessings and the first came when I glanced out the window at the cloudless blue sky and felt the sun's warmth and was blessed by the thought that summer is far from over yet.
Then I went for my morning walk, passing on the way dozens of schoolchildren from the high school, the primary and the intermediate in my suburb, swapping cheerful good mornings with many of them.
I rejoiced at the little ones in crisp, new uniforms being taken to school for the first time by mum and/or dad; and at others, also in crisp, new uniforms, heading for the mysteries of intermediate or high school.
For some their school years will be a burden, a trial and a time of lost opportunities, but for most they will be an adventure in learning and understanding and growing - and these are the ones to whom, like it or not, we will entrust our future.
I returned home to find our little dog, Archie, sitting patiently near his food dish, looking at me with those soulful spaniel eyes as if to say: "Isn't it breakfast time?"
What a blessing it is to have such a pet in the house - affectionate, trusting, grateful, attentive, uncomplaining, forgiving, free of resentment - a being to cherish which will banish loneliness simply by being there.
And for my breakfast - oh joy! - a couple of slices of toast anointed with seedless raspberry jam, which, some will recall, was one of my wishes for the New Year.
This wish was granted, first, by a couple of dear friends who presented me with a jar with a colourful label, complete with my picture taken from the local newspaper, which read: "Raspberry jam for old wrinkly buggers with dodgy teeth."
They had spent an hour or so straining the original product through a sieve.
Meanwhile, a reader in England emailed me about a brand of seedless raspberry jam on the market there, and even provided the name and contact details of the New Zealand agents.
The upshot of which is that I now have on the shelf half a dozen pots of the top-quality Pom product, which is, for this $6000 man (false teeth, glasses and hearing aids) a genuine blessing.
As I munched my toast, I gazed out the window at Lake Rotorua, just one of many enhancing this area, and my mind wandered back to the playgrounds of my youth - fertile Southland, brooding Fiordland, fruitful Central Otago, majestic Southern Alps.
And I was blessed to remember anew what a beautiful, bountiful country I live in, a land of the free far from the turmoil that afflicts so much of the world.
By the time I had finished my coffee, smoked my first cigarette of the day, and was ready to face the hours to come, life didn't seem so bad after all.
