“Don’t panic.” --from “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” by Douglas Adams
Is it time to panic yet?
Set off the alarm bells? Get all hands-on deck? Run around in circles while yelling to no one in particular, “Call 911! Call 911!”
If you feel like panicking about the fraught days we are facing into, you are in very good company. The stock market has plunged in value by more than 20 percent since the beginning of the year. Gas is more than $5 per gallon, the most expensive it’s ever been. The Fed raised interest rates this week by three quarters of a percent, the biggest increase since 1987. Mortgages and credit card debt will now cost more for all of us. With inflation running at 8 percent, the highest rate in 39 years, our wallets and pocketbooks are absolutely getting the squeeze.
Maybe I should be panicking, but I’m not panicked. At least not yet.
Now in my seventh decade of life on this earth, I haven’t seen it all before, but I have seen a lot of it before, including bumpy economic times like those we are living in. Take 1980 when the Fed raised interest rates to 20 percent, as compared to 1.75 percent today. Or hearing stories from my grandfather about gas rationing during the second world war. Forget high prices—there wasn’t even enough to go around. I still remember the September day in 2008 when the stock market dropped by 770 points, the second biggest decline by percentage in history.
Yes, I am tempted to panic, to freak out, to do something, ANYTHING! I don’t know, maybe dump all the stocks in my pension plan and turn it into cash and then hide it under my bed. Or cut out coupons until the cows come and then have them cut coupons with me too. Moo. Save all of my old aluminum foil? Cut out my cable TV and go back to just four channels?
I don’t mean to sound flip. I get how hard economic times can deeply affect people and often for the bad. When I was a kid, I watched my dad struggle with being out of work for almost two years. I saw what it did to his heart, soul, and spirit. It challenged us as a family, forced us to move from a town I loved, dislocated, and disrupted our lives. I know when prices go up people hurt. Especially people who live on the edge economically.
But I also know and trust in the inevitable cycles of this life as we know it and live it. As God made it too. Rise and fall and rise up again. Boom and bust and boom and bust and boom again. Hang on long enough and the night does end, and the sun does come up and the storm stops storming, and spring comes, and yes, even summer shows up!
Which proves the truism that, “This too shall pass.” That’s the gift of the long arc of human history. Wait long enough and times eventually do change. Conditions change. Nations change. The world changes. You just have to be patient enough and have the faith to know and trust in the cycle of life as it unfolds. That’s the gift of faith too. There is a power and a comfort in embracing and trusting traditions thousands of years old, that have stood the test of time. That have stayed while so many other things in the world have come and gone.
And finally, if and when we do panic in the face of life turmoil? It usually does not turn out that well. Panic as an emotion does not bring out the best in us. We tend in fact to make hasty or wrong-headed decisions when freaking out.
A month ago, while on a writing retreat in Minnesota, I experienced the first tornado of my life. Very up close and personal. Driving down the road into a huge, HUGE, and fast developing black cloud, that stretched from horizon to horizon, I realized I had to make a quick decision about my immediate safety. There were no apparent places in sight to shelter and so I panicked and came up with this bright idea. Maybe I could outrun the tornado! Drive faster than the gargantuan clouds roiling and boiling and rotating in the sky. Yup, I tried but that fast-moving maelstrom still got closer and closer.
WHAT TO DO?!
Then my cell phone rang and the Minnesota friend hosting me, told me to find shelter ASAP and get off the road. Good, wise, calm advice. A voice of experience. I spied a movie theater, pulled into the parking lot, evacuated into the safety of the building as those winds howled, and then waited in an auditorium, along with a crowd of high school kids who had also fled the twister. We sat in that cavernous room and waited. And waited. Forty minutes ticked away.
And then the storm passed. Thank God I listened to my level-headed friend and not my inner voice of panic. Thank God all things must pass, including storms, both natural and human made.
Don’t panic. Sage wisdom for stormy times. Don’t panic.
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