Searching for sanity

By Patricia Hunt
Published: September 27, 2008

I am trying to keep my head screwed on straight, but the news is messing with my mind. It reminds me of what it must feel like to live in the path of a hurricane a day or two before the storm actually hits. You go outside and there are people walking on the beach; everything seems fine. You go turn on the television and look at the weather channel, and people with alarm in their voices tell you this big swirling thing on the map is headed right for you. You go back outside and life is pretty normal. It is as if you are living in two different worlds.

My life is the same as it has always been. I go to work. I eat lunch with interesting people at Mary Baldwin College. I go home and do laundry, wash the dog, pay bills. Life goes on. But then I turn on the news, and there are people telling me that financial collapse is looming just offshore of my life. They look worried and scared and angry.

Unlike with a coming hurricane, no one knows what I should do. It is more complicated than boarding up my windows and leaving town. There is no place to hide from whatever is coming, no shelter in Houston or Fairbanks or anywhere at all. Boarding up my windows won’t help.

Until very recently it never occurred to me to keep up with what the stock market was doing. Now I find my self sneaking a peek at the Dow in the middle of the day. The computer sitting on my desk, a tool for my work, becomes a link to Wall Street. What are those people doing? But what am I doing letting this situation take over more and more of my life? I need to get a grip on myself.

I have instituted my own program to maintain sanity. The first thing I do is remember history. Humankind has been through awful situations over and over. When Roosevelt said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he was mostly right. We will get through this somehow. I hope it will be less awful rather than more awful, but we will get through it. Fear doesn’t help much. Courage and hope help a lot.

Secondly, I remind myself that maybe this time we will finally come to understand that all human activity is tied together somehow. The mess on Wall Street is not only affecting Main Street, it is affecting the lives of people in the remotest corners of the globe. I don’t know what will emerge, but it will have to take into account that our activities, our decisions, reverberate around the world. One person sitting in front of a computer lying about his income to get a mortgage he can’t pay back to buy a house he can’t afford ends up affecting a family in China. One investment banker dreaming up schemes to get rich that defy common sense and ethics may mean that some teacher in Nebraska doesn’t have the money to retire. That is the bad news. The good news is that all the good I can inject into the system, the scholarship I help make possible, the plumber I pay, the encouragement I give to someone who needs it also reverberates far beyond the borders of my little life. We all have more influence than we know.

Another essential part of the program to maintain sanity is finding something to do with the anger I feel toward these people who made a muck of everything. How dare they come to me with their bucket asking me to bail them out! They had no desire to share with me in fat times. Don’t come round my door in lean times.

Then I remember that although they had the biggest role in the mess, most of us participated in pension plans or had a 401(k), and the entire system was based on getting profits each and every quarter. Now we need to create systems that allow for and insist on taking the long view instead of immediate gratification. To some extent they acted on our orders. Now we get to issue different orders. Greed has always been around; it is one of the seven deadly sins. In the U.S. we had a hard time believing it was really all that bad; we may come to see that its negative consequences are greater than we realized. That’s good.

The last part of my sanity program is to go take a walk. Look at the mountains. Consider the lilies of the field and the changing leaves. Take a deep breath and a moment for gratitude.

Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a chaplain at Mary Baldwin College.