I am of two minds about the current economic “crisis”.  I am deeply saddened when I see people losing their jobs and watching people’s lives turned upside down, but what if a bit of time off is what the people of this country need?

I am not talking in terms of the economic ebb and flow, people being forced to learn practical money management skills, or about the reformation of the rampant corruption on Wall Street.  I’m talking about a much needed paid vacation for a large number of people.  I have quite a few friends that have been laid off or downsized in the last few months and who have what I could only call “a huge sense of relief.”  They aren’t crying and moping around saying “why me”, they are taking life a bit slower and taking this opportunity to make changes in themselves.

For as long as I can remember the average person who gets into the “rat race” between 18-25 and starts working the 40+ hour weeks that it takes to get by runs out of time to advance personally from whatever age they are introduced from.  All of the work that it takes just to fit into our society takes up all of most people’s time.  I think that this keeps them from advancing themselves personally.  “Who has time for introspection, there are bills to be paid?”  Now time has been forced on a large number of Americans and quite a few are embracing this lifestyle change to recharge their mental batteries.  I have noticed that many are taking this time to seek personal growth.

We are told that stress presses down on us from external forces and that the best we can hope for is to find easy coping mechanisms to deal with it.  This is flat out wrong, but if it is all that you are ever taught I can see where people would believe it.  The reality is that stress is not an external force pushing down but an internal force pushing out, it is created by our minds and then presented to the world through our actions.

It is easy to control how much stress you feel as long as you realize that it is you who is creating it.  Once you accept that realization you can begin to look into yourself and see what it is that you are doing to bring this feeling on yourself.  If you know what it is that you are doing to cause stress you can make changes in your life to let yourself relax.  The only problem is that this process takes time that most people don’t feel like they have.  It takes a while sometimes to figure out the whys inside ourselves and I am seeing more and more people who have been forcefully ejected from the rat race taking that time and coming out much happier people.

So it makes me feel both saddened and happy to see that our economy has slowed down tremendously but maybe that is just what Americans need, a forced vacation.

I consider it a positive trait to be comfortable in many different situations, and it’s something that I have always worked on in myself.  When I feel awkward or uncomfortable I try to realize that (unless the situation is physically dangerous) these feelings arise from me and are not the product of the actual place.  The squirmy sensation generally comes from a lack of real understanding about my surroundings.   “A lack of real understanding” is a bit vague so I will give an example.  If I were in a meat packing plant I would feel uncomfortable.  I would be surrounded by death and blood and would think that it was gross, but the butchers who work at that plant would not be affected by it at all because the butchers are intimately familiar with the process.  Some people call this being desensitized but I think of it as the complete opposite, all of their senses are working perfectly; they just understand what is going on and are no longer put off by it, due to their understanding.  This is a bit of a philosophical rant, but it relates to the story at hand.

Last night I spent the night sleeping on a hard linoleum floor in the stroke ward of a hospital.  Let me be clear in that I haven’t had a stroke and as far as I know that isn’t the particular problem going on with my friend either, but it is the neurological area of the hospital to which he has been assigned.  To give his wife and family a break I ran watch last night in a place that I can easily say made me uncomfortable before I was sensitized to it.

The room that we were in was a shared room, and the other half of it was filled with a young Asian man who seems to have had some type of terrible stroke.  He is almost completely unresponsive to the world except for the occasional long eerie groan.  There are no cots and only very uncomfortable straight back chairs for visitors so my options for sleep were pretty limited. I chose the floor, where at least I could stretch myself out a bit (I’m not a small guy).  As the night wore on, there were nurses and orderlies coming in and out every hour to do room checks and their approaching steps would wake me up from any small respite of sleep that I could snatch.  But the main culprit in the uneasy feeling was the deep resonating depression of a stroke ward.  It is a long hallway filled with people have recently had their lives smashed by a horrible affliction.  There are tears constantly around the waiting rooms and outside of half open doors.  There are stern faced nurses who have seen it all.  There are half drooped people slumping through the halls with a family member and a rolling I.V. stand.  It had me unnerved at first.

After I realized that I was actually emotionally uncomfortable I started to look around with deeper eyes at my surroundings.  Those half drooped patients were striving to recover and bring back their life.  Those nurses were steely eyed and stern faced because they were working as hard as they could to help heal those who had hope and to give hope to those who did not.  Those tears were from the hurt that can only come from really loving someone, these people were not alone and unloved.  The stroke ward of that hospital was not a scary place, it was a place of peace and I was just a cog in that turning wheel by sleeping on that floor and trying to give some of that peace to my friends.  Once I realized that, despite the physical discomfort I was out like a light.

Today all of my toughts are with my friend Sean.  I hope that you read this and all is well.

-tom

I am new to the world of MacBooks, but I am in it.  I decided to play around with mine today and this is what came out.  iMovie and GarageBand are amazing programs.

The song in the video has been in my head for weeks and sometimes playing it is the only way to get it out.  This song takes me back to my youth.  I can still feel the warm wind through the pick-up truck windows.  The music still sounds thin from the old speakers and worn-out cassette tape.  I’m in the truck with my Dad and we are going wade fishing in the Shenandoah river… The only other things that gives me vivid visceral memories like that are smells.  Songs are a lot like smells.  Smells that you can hear.

I’m not scared of this swine flu (or whatever it’s called).  I have also had a very hard time finding anyone I know who is actually scared by it at all, but it is all over the mainstream media right now.  This says something to me.  It means to me that the media has become the boy who cried wolf a few times too many.  Their stories are beginning to lose their bite because their credibility has been lost.  In the mainstream media it is alway the apocalypse with just a slightly different flavor.  Maybe a better metaphor is the little chicken that screamed that the sky was falling, but I’m not sure that I remember how that story ended.  I know that the boy who cried wolf end with him being eaten by wolves, and I’m not trying to say that I think that we are all going to die if we don’t listen to the news on the one time that we need to.  What I am trying to say is that we don’t need to be scared to be informed or interested and I hope that the media in this country learns this.  Here are some stats that I have found.

- 36,000 people die from the regular flu every year. (not the Swine variety)
- only 1 person in the United States has died from swine flu. (an infant, still sad though)
- In Mexico the total number of confirmed deaths from Swine Flu is only between 7 and 18, and while there are around 2000 confirmed cases, that is less than you would see during a regular flu season.

So why are we supposed to be afraid?  What good does it do?  Are we as a society that addicted to fear that we will buy it whenever it’s sold?  If so are we coming out of this addiction or is it only getting worse?

While I don’t personally know any people who have expressed any fear about this “pandemic outbreak” there have to be some people out there that are soaking it up, because they keep spreading it on.

Mostly this thing is bugging me because I was supposed to go to Cozumel, Mexico this week and my travel plans have been changed for me, and no one asked if I was afraid to go.

With all that said, I am very excited to be leaving town for a while.  If anyone needs me this next week they can reach me by airplane messenger in the Caribbean, but don’t send the plane unless you really need me.

This is a video that I stumbled across… it is a very beautiful and eloquent way of saying something that I have felt for a long time… the animation is OK, but the point is fantastic.

Music and Life – Alan Watts