It is the
sufferings and insecurities
of our lives that, although painful and distressing,
teach us not to cling to the impermanent things of this world.
Not even the greatest master could teach us so well.
We should honor and respect them,
not shun their company.
Slowly, then all at once
Whatever else
one thinks of how we live
these days, it’s hard to not see it
as temporary, historically anomalous,
a peculiar blip in human experience. I’ve spent
my whole life riding around in cars, never questioning
whether the makings of tomorrow’s supper would be there waiting
on the supermarket shelves, never doubting when I entered a room that the
lights would go on at the flick of a switch, never worrying about my
personal safety. And now hardly a moment goes by when I
don’t feel tremors of massive change in these things,
as though all life’s comforts and structural
certainties rested on a groaning
fault line.
…Everything
we know about it seems
to indicate that human beings happily
go along with the program — whatever the program is —
until all of a sudden they can’t, and then they don’t. It’s like the
quote oft-repeated these days (because it’s so apt for these times) by surly
old Ernest Hemingway about how the man in a story went broke: slowly, and then
all at once. In the background of last week’s reassuring torpor, one ominous little
signal flashed perhaps dimly in all that sunshine: the price of oil broke above
$81-a-barrel. Of course in that range it becomes impossible for the staggering
monster of our so-called “consumer” economy to enter the much-wished-for
nirvana of “recovery” — where the orgies of spending on houses and
cars and electronic entertainment machines will resume like
the force of nature it is presumed to be. Over $80-a-barrel
and we’re in the zone where what’s left of this economy
cracks and crumbles a little bit more each day,
lurching forward to that moment when
something life-changing occurs
all at once.
