Look at the world today and people are worried about the credit crunch, increases in energy prices. They are concerned about the world economy but they don’t know why.

Warren Buffet, you know him he’s the world’s richest man at the moment and is usually there or thereabouts, says that the good times are most likely over. His right hand man, Charlie Munger, says the last sixty years have been the pinnacle of western civilisation, the next sixty years are unlikely to be so good and that his generation have been priveleged to have lived through such an auspicious time.

Where does that leave the rest of us? If we accept the Buffet/Munger hypothesis - they work very closely as a team so their views are likely to be the same on issues such as this - then the trace of our civilisation has reached its zenith and that now the trajectory is downwards. How do we address this in relation to the fundaments of happiness or the triad of fulfilment, development and purpose?

Truth is it doesn’t matter. The sun will rise and set, the tides will rise and fall and the procession of the seasons will continue. People will be born, people will die. In short, life goes on. We are moving through changes all of the time, in fact change is the only constant in all our lives. We are born as one thing and move through a sequence of metamorphoses that lead us into other domains. Other places and scenarios that perhaps we never imagined.

When I was a child I remember fantasising with friends about where we might be in the year 2000, we couldn’t get our heads around the idea of being adults and were utterly lost on the notion of what we might be doing with our lives. But we got there, we moved through it andf our situations were all different, some of us with families and careers, businesses, responsibilities, some of us did not make it. the point is that we had no real idea how the future would pan out. Yes we had hopes and dreams and we worked around the axis that they gave us but we did not know.

Prediction is an imprecise art based upon the probability of certain outcomes given a set of fixed parameters. We are inclined towards divination by nature, we look at the skies to see what the weather might bring, we look to the runes of our lives and the balance of probabilities that support us like a swimmer in a pool of liquid. Are we good looking, gifted, talented, bright, illumined and so on. What will we become with the blessings showered upon us or indeed the obstacles that we may have to overcome.

A new dawn breaks on a new world but it is only the world of our perceptions. The world exists as a plastic medium but the Universe exists as a set of incontrovertible principles that elegantly preside over all things. While dramas come and go, one thing is certain, we will continue our journeys, collectively, individually, we will flourish and become more accomplished.