Loading ...Such A Heavy Heart
Sometimes when I write an article here, I struggle for a title, but not this time.
I look around the world and all the people who are scared and vulnerable and feel so sad. I even look at my own children and their friends (who have had to abandon their University studies and all of the exciting plans they had for the coming year). Am I the only one finding it hard to sleep at the moment ? I’m a very solid sleeper, and never suffered from any form of insomnia, but all that has changed. I wake up in the middle of the night, completely unable to get back to sleep.
Back in 2008, the GFC and near-collapse of the world banking system (and conversations with a friend and colleague) woke me up to what was going on, and I’ve been on a quest to make sense of it ever since (telling anyone who would listen to my ‘crazy’ ideas). I’m a weather forecaster. I deal in science, mathematics, logic, probabilities and hazard/disaster scenario planning (with the Civil Contingency Community). Putting all of this together, tracking the charts and educating myself has only led to an ever increasing conviction, that what I wrote in an article back in 2009 is correct. I printed out the article and stuck it in a drawer. I’ve just had another look at it. I wrote about Strauss and Howes ‘Fourth Turning’ and then went on to say ‘Whilst we’re being told about the green shoots of recovery and economies emerging from recession, what we are really seeing is a very feeble pause in the downward spiral towards a major global economic crisis, only possible because of the trillions of £/$?Euros pumped in to shore up the crippled financial institutions’
That was over 10 years ago, and I had no idea the Fed et al could keep it pumped for that long. I’ve often seen people ask what sort of world we’d be living in if gold went up 8-fold like it did between 2000 and 2011. I’m afraid we’re likely to find out. I will continue to chart and post here, but if PM’s (and eventually commodities) rise causes pain and misery it will be with a very heavy heart. I don’t think any of us really wanted it this way.
Europe is literally crumbling in front of my eyes. I’ve visited so many of these wonderful countries and spent happy times with their people. I was at Lake Garda in Italy just last year. Spain, Portugal, France, Greece, Turkey, the Canary Islands, Cyprus, Malta, Poland, Croatia – I have such fond memories of them all, and to see them quite literally shut down, with no functioning economy for months breaks my heart.
To those in the US who may still be thinking it won’t happen to you, I’ve been warning you – it will. All of our economies and stock markets and banks are at systemic risk now. I haven’t heard one single, rational explanation how the multi, multi trillion Dollar bill for all of this can be paid. I’m fairly confident that some very effective therapies to help combat this will eventually be found, but so far, nothing is preventing one of the worlds best healthcare systems in Italy from being way, way past its maximum capacity. If you’re not too concerned, you really, really should be.
Back in 2008 all the wrong decisions were made, and since then nothing has been fixed. More excess and wealth-harvesting by the elites, whilst the 95% are burdened with debt to maintain normal life (a perfect example is the £50,000 debt most students have after completing University). Inter bank lending has been just a few percent, whilst we have to pay many times that to finance a car, or any other large item – even mortgages don’t see the rate cuts being passed on.
And one last point. This idea that the biggest bubble has just met the pin to burst it. I agree that’s true, but it’s more complex than that. The big bubble is made up of lots of smaller bubbles. One pin often lets the air out of a limited number of the bubbles within the big bubble. This time it’s different. The virus is multiple pins (one in every country) and that one pin in each country is simultaneously bursting EVERY bubble. Think about the implications of that for a moment.
So, yes, I have a very heavy heart. The people WE elected have let us all down. Maybe the virus couldn’t have been prevented but the size of the bubble could, and perhaps, just perhaps, we should spend more time looking after each other, this precious Earth and preparing for threats to all of humanity, rather than spending incredible amounts of money on fighting wars and blowing bubbles.
Thanks for the heartfelt article… most gold bugs are bugs.. because of the disgust in the equities market.. at the expense of encouraging it.. my case anyways. But lately also realized.. an insane price for an oz. of gold also means soemthing really bad on the other end.. as gold is simply a measuring stick.
I think we’d all be better off we 100$ gold.
Indeed Patrick, and a safer, fairer society where you don’t feel the need to chase monetary gain and security.
I think that’s called heaven, but you have to die to get there.
Wonderfully put, as it certainly echoes my sentiments.
Thanks Northstar for the heartfelt post.
I have a little different take on all this. Though it’s an intellectual one and I know if the destruction continues to unfold, I may suffer more also.
But nature is a self balancing machine. Anything that pushes it out of balance, it will push back. And it does all this all the time.
I certainly believe we have pushed extremely hard on our each other and our environment.
I’m finding with all this pressure of this new virus, many of my friends are being MUCH, MUCH more reflective.
Many of us are being forced to live much more simply AND appreciating it!
And I do believe this has been necessary and is a positive outcome.
I absolutely believe that this stress, that we are going through, is leading to VERY good things.
THIS is how nature works….
Action, reaction and resultant.
When nature is stressed, it re-balances. WE are being re-balanced in ways we may not even understand?
I know I may come across as WAY too detached from all of this, but I have lived most of my life now keeping these principle
of nature in mind. IT DOES NOT MEAN THAT I DON”T SUFFER! But it does bring relief from suffering at times.
More than anything, our minds are preoccupied with the events of the past and fear of the future.
The present moment is all that is real.
Right now, in the present, nature is re-balancing. It’s not pretty and it’s painful, but it is our nature.
The old saying, you can’t fight mother nature…..Nature in the end, always wins 100% of the time.
In the East, it’s learning to accept that over and over again until you are finally broken.
Nature is full of stress, constantly re-adjusting to stress.
When we fight it we lose 100% of the time.
Now this doesn’t mean I don’t suffer myself and am completely accepting of how nature works.
But it is a start to keep it in mind and at least TRY to bring one’s mind back into the present moment when you can.
It’s really all there is anyway…..
Thanks Steins, what Beautiful sentiments! I couldn’t agree more that the current stress we are going though will lead to good things. That life view helps one be a survivor rather than a victim. In difficult circumstances it’s the lack of control that derails people I have found that in the most dire situations (even cancer X2), there’s always a way to take charge and regain some control. Living in the moment is one, as are many others. One of my favorites (after amassing all possible information) is to get moving. Forrest Gump had it right! The minute I heard about the CoV crisis in China, I ramped up my occasional treadmill routine. And have every day since, along with my musical headphones which never fail to bring a smile to my face. And I have tried to ramp up the immune system too (doubling vit D intake, for starters). There are so many things we can do! I would be interested in hearing what other folks have been doing to improve life in the moment during this difficult time. 🙂
Thanks so much Alfa!
I kind of took a chance writing what I did, not wanting to trivialize anything but at the same time, hopefully bringing some perspective
The steps you point out are just the same as for me….get exercise, listen to some of your favorite stuff and most of all, trust in nature to do what is right for the big picture.
Following is a great article: It’s a FANTASTIC READ!!!
“Worrying,” wrote Lewis Thomas, “is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions.” Thomas — physician, philosopher, essayist, administrator (dean of the Yale and New York University medical schools, head of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center) — thought we worry too much about our health, as though a human being is “a teetering, fallible contraption, always needing watching and patching, always on the verge of flapping to pieces.”
So at this worrisome moment, fill your idle hands with Bill Bryson’s 2019 book, “The Body: A Guide for Occupants.” It will fill your mind with reasons for believing that you are not flimsy, even though “we are just a collection of inert components.” Including seven billion billion billion (7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) atoms, not one of which cares a fig about you. In the time it took to read this far into this sentence, your busy body manufactured 1 million red blood cells that will surge through you every 50 seconds — 150,000 times (a hundred or so miles) before, in about four months, they die and are replaced for the greater good, meaning: for you.
Bryson says it is estimated that every day between one and five of your cells turns cancerous and your immune system kills them: “A couple of dozen times a week, well over a thousand times a year, you get the most dreaded disease of our age, and each time your body saves you.” What he calls “three billion years of evolutionary tweaks” have taught your body some neat tricks.
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Viruses, Bryson says, “bide their time.” A previously unknown one, found in Siberia in 2014 after having been confined in permafrost for 30,000 years, was injected into an amoeba and “sprang into action with the lustiness of youth.” To stave off death from the coronavirus, we diligently scrub our largest organ, our skin, the surface of which, the epidermis, is . . . dead. Bryson says “all that makes you lovely is deceased. Where body meets air, we are all cadavers,” shedding a million dead flakes an hour.
Just as well, considering that every square centimeter of your skin contains about 100,000 microbes, and about 200 species of microbes inhabit your skin. Some of the many trillions of living things that call your body home were studied in North Carolina State University’s Belly Button Biodiversity Project, which swabbed the belly buttons of 60 randomly selected Americans and found 2,368 species of bacteria, 1,458 of which were previously unknown to science.
The three spongy pounds of mostly water, plus fat and protein, called the brain exists in darkness, yet it tells us everything we know about the world that it has never seen. “Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years.” A grain-of-sand-sized bit of cortex “could hold two thousand terabytes of information,” enough to store every movie, or 1.2 billion copies of Bryson’s book. Small wonder this 2 percent of body weight uses 20 percent of our energy.
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The energy expended by the 200 million steps you will take in your lifetime comes from improved modern nutrition that explains why puberty, which began at 16 or 17 five centuries ago, now generally begins at 11. Food, of which Americans consume unhealthy amounts (nearly 25 percent more caloriesthan in 1970, when they already were not svelte), makes this nation simultaneously overfed and nutritionally deficient. Millennials scarf down avocado toast, oblivious of the fact that one avocado has, Bryson says, “five times as much saturated fat as a small bag of potato chips.” He adds: “The amount of vegetables eaten by the average American between 2000 and 2010 dropped by thirty pounds,” which is not alarming because America’s most popular vegetable “by a very wide margin is the French fry.”
The aforementioned brain does not always generate prudent choices but it did rid the world of the most devastating disease, smallpox, which, Bryson reminds us, “infected nearly everyone who was exposed to it and killed about 30 percent of victims” — about half a billion in the 20th century. This is one of many reasons “if you are a seventy-year old man in America today, you have only a 2 percent chance of dying in the next year. In 1940, that probability was reached at age fifty-six.”
Globally, the approximately 160,000 people who will die today picked a good time to live. And it is highly probable that the ratio of human worrying about health, to actually worrisome conditions, will continue to enlarge.
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