Chicken Little, the sky is falling!

"Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is." -- German proverb

"Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I hate fear.  It scares me." --Daffy Duck

"Fear sends stock market plummeting - Gloomy outlook - Asian markets tumble - Mortgage frauds - Hard times"

Ah, the news, isn't it great?  These are headlines from USA Today's Money Section, October 16, 2008.  We, like many other Americans, are losing lots of hard-earned money.  We can't help but wonder about the future.  With all the doom and gloom it's difficult to know what to do, if anything, or what to think.  The politicians are talking but no one knows what the solution could possibly be.  

It's even more difficult not to run amuck with fear.

But what is fear?  It's an emotion.  Is it based in reality?  Sometimes, but it's not usually immediate danger.  Not like standing in front of an angry bear with large claws.  Ordinarily we do not live with that kind of fear.  Ordinary fear is usually the slow, water-dripping kind.  The kind that lets you build up all kinds of unused adrenalin that results in health problems.  The kind that ruins your sleep or causes constant anxiety.

So I look around and today (and just for today), I still have my family, my house, a car to drive, food to eat and a sunny sky to enjoy.  It's back to that theme of choice.  What do I choose to focus on?  I'd rather count my blessings than get out a calculator with my financial statements and count every penny lost.  I'm not adopting a head in the sand attitude either.  I acknowledge that perhaps our country could be in very deep trouble for a long time.  The flip side of this mess is that collectively we have created it and collectively we could get ourselves out of it by making some major changes.  

Deepak Chopra wrote a wonderful book, Peace is the Way.  A basic premise of his way of thinking is that we create our own reality, that peace begins within each of us.  What we are experiencing socially is herd mentality based in fear, the perpetuation of fear and the hard-core selling of fear by someone in the Oval Office and all his corporate minions for the last 8 years.  It does not have to be this way!  I refuse to emotionally buy into hysteria until the bear is in my face.

"Fear is only as deep as the mind allows it." --Japanese proverb

"A further sign of health is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it's time to stop struggling and look directly at what's threatening us." --Pema Chodren