Travel Light

The world didn't end today. At least I don't think it did.

Yesterday the stock market posted its largest single session point loss in history, dropping 778 points and representing a loss of approximately 2.1 trillion dollars. I don't pretend to understand very much about the financial system, and particularly the stock market, but I do know that a country without credit is a country flirting with economic disaster. Credit is how many companies make payroll. It's how ordinary citizens buy cars and homes and just about everything now. It's how credit card companies make a profit. Moreover, the stock market is how most of America is now saving for its retirement. Without credit and viable stocks, I truly shudder to think what might happen.

I was braced for the worst today, as was most of the world. Incredibly, stocks "rallied" (though it's still open to question whether or not that was a true rally or just optimism in anticipation of a retooled "bailout" bill being passed by Congress soon) and were up 485 points, only the third time in history that the market has gone up over 400 points in a day. Tomorrow? Who knows? But for now, we all breathed a bit easier.

Days like this are sobering and frightening. While it seems like most people I know just sort of shrug it off and chalk it up to "just something else that's outside my control". While I think they do this at their own peril, there's a kind of blissful obliviousness about this attitude I almost envy. Ultimately, you really CAN'T do much about crisises of this magnitude besides call your congressman and express your thoughts, and vote accordingly in the next election, and pray if you are so inclined.

But times like these serve another positive function. They remind us of the incredible insignificance of most of the things we worry about on a daily basis; poor drivers, unruly co workers, the overcooked pizza we received from the local pizza joint, telemarketers, etc. What exactly are we wasting our time agonizing over? These are the worries of people that are well fed and healthy and have shelter and work. They are not, I would wager, what the majority of the world's population has the luxury of worrying about.

Times of great uncertainty also remind us of how much cultural and personal "baggage" we all carry. If you don't have a job, if your savings have suddenly dried up and you're trying to decide what you can cut out of your life and still have some sense of normalcy and humanity, suddenly having Pay per View service or superfast internet don't seem like high priorities. If you can't afford gas to get to work, if your kids' medical bills are piling up and you just got laid off, maybe the weekly boat outing fades in priority. Travelling "heavy" like this works OK if you are on an escalator, but once you get into the desert of the tundra, you can't afford anything that isn't absolutely necessary. All these extraneous time wasting, escapist diversions we have all enjoyed and made such an intricate part of our lives, technological toys that corporations have convinced us we all need but that we all lived quite well (and more cheaply) without, Ipods, Iphones, cell phones, Bluetooth, HiDef and Blu-Ray TVs, GPSes and automatic engine starters, CD burners and video games are essentially, dead weight in a crisis. None of them put food or water into our bodies, provide warmth or shelter from the cold, or help us find work or pay our bills.

At some point, those may be the only worries we can afford to concentrate on. Hopefully, that won't be the case tomorrow; I enjoy my extraneous and guilty pleasures as much as the next person, and can't imagine my life without them. But in times like these, I begin to consider what I can divest myself of and still survive, about what really matters and by extension, about what defines me and who I really am. All of these gadgets and habits really are just that; they don't speak to the core of what my life needs to be, of why I'm here or why any of us are here.

A pared down, lean life is not the most exciting existence to consider, but the current economic crisis forces us to think about what that would be like, about how much weight we've all carried around for so long, weight that we could easily shed and still be ourselves, or at least, versions of ourselves. Like 9/11, any paradigm shifting event has at least one positive affect. It reminds us all of what is truly important in our complex lives and makes us look in the mirror and consider how truly blessed we are.