As John Brunner once wrote, “It is one thing to talk glibly about the determinism of history but quite another thing altogether to find oneself caught up in historical forces like dead leaf on the gale.”
At the moment I feel a wee bit like a dead leaf on the gale. As I wrote in a few posts ago, “Waiting for the dead cat bounce”, I had a nice neat plan for selling our house, which, had it all gone through, would have insulated us from much of the gloom and turmoil of the moment. Like so many nice, neat plans I got the timing wrong, so it didn’t happen. So here I am swirling around in the wind looking for that anchor point to allow me to shift to Brunner’s more optimistic image of the Shockwave Rider surfing on the waves of change.
There is a backhanded plus to all this. Had my nice, neat plan gone through I could have found myself basking in a smug disinterest. From one perspective looming stagflation, collapsing property prices, high oil prices, the credit crunch and loss of confidence in our government are all a plus – necessary correctives to a set of collective delusions.
While I still think that is the case, finding one self suffering some of the consequences of those corrections along with millions of others, pushed into the situation of having to focus on getting by, may be a better place to think through what is to be done, rather than one of Olympian detachment – a more human, empathetic place.
The downside is, of course, that one is so busy focusing on the day to day business of getting by that that one has little time, inclination or energy to look at the larger picture and to spot the opportunities for positive change that the current shifts in mood and circumstance generate.
This again may be a question of timing. At the moment we have swapped one form of hysteria for another. I suspect that, while not comfortable, things are not going to be as bad as a reading of the financial press would suggest. (I am talking in the relative short term here.) After a while we will reach gloom fatigue – gloom will lose the thrill of novelty and our media will start looking for “things are not so bad stories”.
This is the danger point. There are important lessons to be learnt from the current situation in terms of what not to do, what doesn’t work. Moving from that to seeing what we should be doing is more difficult and will require greater imagination, creativity and improvisation, to say nothing of some hard reality checks. The danger is that as the gloom lifts we will find ourselves returning to the same old same old rather than taking account of the place we all find ourselves in and dealing with it.
As for me, I may allow myself a brief period of indulging in dead leaf mode, but then it is on to the Shockwave Rider.