Beyond the Crux: Out from the In

We humans are paradoxical beings. We tend to stew our lives in hope, spiced with either pessimism or optimism, depending on how we view our current circumstances. When times are rough, we tend to sprinkle our outlooks with pessimism; when life is good, we’re liberal with optimism.

The term ‘karma’ is largely misunderstood by most of the western world. It is not a predetermined destiny as we’re all trained to believe, but a predetermined outcome based on our habitual reaction to given circumstances.

We tend to view our past as the better times of our lives, no matter what the past held. In reality, it is through eyes filled with youthful exuberance, nostalgia and wonder that we remember the old days.

I do recall the economic hard times our country went through when I was young, but they didn’t really affect me. I still had the entire wide and wonderful world before me. The current crisis is worse than any I knew before, because of that marshmallow-in-the-microwave effect, but for those who didn’t lose their jobs or take a pay cut, nothing is really different, other than personal unwillingness to keep spending money they don’t have yet or money they now need to save because their investments collapsed or are still threatened.

And is not spending money we should be saving a bad thing?

It depends of course, on your perspective. If your paycheck depends on people spending beyond necessities, then, yes, indeed it is. And I happen to be one of those people. On the other hand, if we’ve learned from all this to live within our budgets and to depend upon more reliable and realistic investments, then perhaps no one will again put a marshmallow in the microwave and expect us to believe it’s viable to build our lives on top of it.

I don’t believe the economy will ever ‘recover’ to what it was. How can it? It was built on fluff. But I do believe that we will rebuild it. It will take a new way of thinking and a bit of creativity, but we’re resilient, we humans, and we have an amazing willingness to pull ourselves back up when we fall. One day we’ll get tired of waiting for someone to rescue us. We may not like to work hard when we don’t have to, but if that’s what it takes, we roll up our sleeves, grab the tools we need and get to it. That’s the way we were programmed.

And I believe we’ll do just that.

Some day in the not-too-distant future, we’ll look back and remember the days of rebuilding our lives as the good times: viewing the past through rose-colored glasses just as we always have, and just as we always will.

(Since I haven’t been out taking pictures often enough, I went to flickr and downloaded some free pics that I felt matched my mood for this post. Enjoy, I found them beautiful.)