Counting our blessings

It is an old adage that we should count our blessings, and it is an equally ancient failing of human beings that they should fail to do so. For we are as much problem seeking as problem solving creatures, and we soon feel wretched if we have nothing to complain about.

My wife and I once visited a missionary doctor in Haiti called Dr Hodges. I had met him there 10 years earlier, when he told me that he wished to retire soon in Haiti and concentrate on archaeology. (He had discovered the place where Christopher Columbus had first landed and founded a small museum.) But when we met him again the medical …