Crunch

It was Oscar Wilde who said that a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Here in the West there is anxiety, I’m reminded of ‘Panic’ by the Smiths, the idea that the icons of our great surge forward have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Feet of clay, the exquisite pirouettes traced by the fantasies of a million happy home owners whose wealth would never cease to grow has all come to an abrupt halt. A bit like when the alarm clock interrupts a particularly satisfying dream.

In days like these people start to consider what is actually important. There is a process in the zeitgeist of reassessing and re-evaluating. People tend to take stock of their situation and start to slow down a little in the headlong pursuit of material abundance. Let’s just wait and see, I predict a time of serious introspection and a clamour of discontent, especially among those who have never known anything other than the embarrassment of material riches that the West has ‘enjoyed’ these past decades. 

Life is for living and is an arena wherein the dramas and accomplishments of our experiences may be embellished and added to. The acquisition of wisdom and understanding is an ideal that outweighs the acquisition of physical objects or things. In the theatre of all our tomorrows will we weep tears of joy or anguish and whose seeds are already sown in each of us. Let us harvest the crop of our own hopes and dreams and hope that they are a fitting match for the priorities that the place we discover ourselves in sets as its standard.