The latest numbers show unemployment in the U.S. up to 9.9 percent. Economists say it’s the result of previously discouraged jobseekers returning to the hunt inspired by news of incipient recovery poised to sweep across the country.
Meanwhile, the stock market plunges down five big stories before hopping up one, scared investors pour into the bond market, and Europe teeters on the edge of bankruptcy.
Above all, this stuff has been going on two years or so now, and a lot of people have been out of work that whole time. Credit cards are maxed out, foreclosures continue, and retirement savings are about gone in many households.
How long can we hold our breaths waiting for better times? When do the hobo jungles reappear? What do we tell the kids? How are we expected to keep from just freaking out?
It can be done. You don’t have to whistle a happy tune, imagine pennies falling from heaven, declare happy days are here again and believe that wishing will make it so.
We’re not even looking for happiness as an ultimate goal here. We’re just after a way to maintain our composure and not collapse into quivering blobs of anxiety. We just want to remain functional enough to be able to think rationally and come up with a plan that might lead us out of our personal quagmires.
And just as that state of composed functionality is what’s required to be able to change our physical circumstances, it’s also what we need to grab and hold onto any peace at all, in bad times or good.
Because, whether or not it seems like this in times of physical want, what really matters in the long run is how you’re doing inside. America came through the Great Depression physically without ever emerging spiritually. Despite Greatest Generation nostrums about money not being everything, when our fathers and grandfathers got back from the war they acted like it was all that mattered. They threw up shopping malls and suburban sprawl, turned the countryside into a parking lot, and settled back on their sofas to watch commercials interrupted occasionally by sit coms.
There was a brief, failed rebellion in the 60s against the materialist, conformist spiritual swamp we had fallen into, followed by five decades of miserable reaction.
Now this second great economic crisis may be giving us a second opportunity for regeneration. I doubt that a lot of people will seize the moment with the gusto they should, but maybe you, sitting there reading this, can do something really good for yourself, and for the people around you who have to deal with yourself.
Rather than losing yourself in anxiety, panic, and every-man-for-himselfism, concentrate on what you can do next.
Don’t freak out over some imagined final disaster falling upon you and your loved ones next week, or next month, or five years from now; focus instead on what you can do right now. The next step is not only the most important one you can take to start changing things, it’s also the only thing you can do right now. The next step is all you’ve got.
Delay taking it and you just increase the odds of future calamity.
The fear comes from all the things that you can’t do anything about, because they lie in the future and you’re here right now. Let the future go. At this moment you can do nothing about it.
Believe in a power that is there to take on the fear when you decide to let it go. Then let it go. Then take the next step.
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