Every week I get an invitation to join the recession, but so far I’ve managed to say “No Thanks!” I am speaking of a recessionary mindset. It’s been at least six months and you can’t go anywhere without hearing bad news that hits close to home: a painful personal story of a friend or family member getting laid off, stories of communities struggling to cover essential services, daily reports of the “the numbers” that indicate further decline in our nation’s economic health and in other nation’s economies. It feels a little like being under siege. Saying “no thanks” to a recessionary mindset becomes much harder as tough times come home to roost in our own midst, in our own families.
So where is hope now? How do we weather what some thought would just be a short-lived “winter of discontent” that now looks to stretch on much longer? Surely there is a need for belt tightening on all of our parts, and that’s not a bad thing in and of itself. But I’m beginning to notice other levels of impact from all this bad news. There’s something insidious here in the way I—and others I know—are looking at our own lives, our choices and what the future holds. The necessary external contraction of frivolous spending or use of resources has translated into a kind of internal pulling in or pulling away. It’s subtle in some ways and can look like a person is just being prudent or thoughtful about committing time, money or energy. Better to wait until things become clearer, less volatile, more stable. The risk, though, is that the need to be prudent too easily becomes a kind of paralysis.
Hope “is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart…” Those lines help me to recognize that I can, in fact, find an internal orientation that can hold its own when I’m overcome by scarcity thinking. I can incline my heart to hope—looking for the many small ways hope is in evidence around me every day, even as I know there is so much that remains out of my control.
As hard as I may be pulling back on some things I also need to remember to reach out! To reach out to connect with others in my family and community, to reach in to find the courage to continue to take risks, to reach toward those things—many of them simple and close at hand—that bring me joy.
