Neither Here Nor There

When life presents major challenges it's easy to bring on the drama and take an extreme approach to combat this disruption to our idyllic status quo. Some survivalists suffer from this as do the naysayers who practice business-as-usual. This contrarian attitude also affects those who play the stock market game as well described by Jon Markman in his recent MSN Money blog which is well worth a read.

When I first saw the title of his post Why hope (or fear) is a bad bet now, it seemed to overlay nicely into our survivalist conversation. I don't think either of those extreme responses are helpful for living since neither of them really offer a present sense of peace but rather represent placing a bet on one of two extreme outcomes, neither of which are 100% likely. And then there are those who fluctuate dramatically between the two never pausing for long at that peaceful place inbetween.

It seems unreasonable to cling to either hope or fear when we consider that we never really have enough information about a situation to really make an accurate prediction anyway. We think we have all the details, usually because "experts" tell us they have all the details but if we critically examine the sources of information and if we simply look to past performance we get a very clear message that no one really knows what they're talking about. When dealing with complex future scenarios like climate change, peak-oil or pandemics our accuracy is even worse. This poor aim then creates situations where extreme reactions like hope or fear are probably going to be most unhelpful because the decision for either was based on bad information and often information that was invented in our heads. The stuff we make up is by far the largest hinderance to accessing internal peace and life satisfaction.

The solution is to remain neutral and flexible, preparing for difficult times while still taking in the wonderful experiences of the present moment. By reacting to new developments with a measured practicality, always looking for the facts instead of the stories, and taking our time we are more likely to make the best decisions.

We still could be wrong, but more likely kinda wrong instead of gravely mistaken.