My parents grew up during the Great Depression, although they had very different childhood experiences. My mother’s family was relatively unaffected. My dad’s family, however, lived as sharecroppers, subsisting for months at a time on a diet of cornmeal and home-grown tomatoes. The old photo on the left is a picture of my dad with his father and younger brother, standing in their field.
As I was growing up, I observed my dad, and my friends’ parents, and I developed a theory. I noticed that children of the Depression took one of two routes in adulthood. Some, like my father, became big risk-takers, always going for the brass ring in life. The majority, however, spent their lives working in jobs that promised security. They were drawn to employment in government jobs, and in stable corporations. They wanted the regular paycheck and the guaranteed pension.
After World War II, college attendance began to rise sharply. Today we encourage our children to get a degree because we believe a good education will guarantee the security of better jobs. More and more people are seeking graduate degrees to improve their hopes for economic security.
Currently more than one out of ten Americans are out of work, and I am constantly receiving emails from readers who are desperate for financial security. Many people I know are losing their homes. We have a number of friends in California whose beautiful houses have dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars in value. Many people now have absolutely no idea what shape their financial future will take.
But it isn’t just financial security that people are seeking. Often we seek security in relationships. Single people long for a close connection to a partner, and people in unhappy marriages dream of the security of being with someone more compatible.
What we all know, but are often unwilling to face honestly, is that there is no security in human life.
During the 1970s, many of those adults who grew up during the Depression learned that difficult lesson, when big companies began to lay off older workers to save the expense of paying retirement benefits. After the sustained excitement of record stock market highs, the economy is now in the deepest recession since the 1930s. And after some years of dramatic rises in real estate prices, millions of properties now sit in foreclosure, or face imminent foreclosure.
As we have seen, economies may change quickly. Peaceful societies may disintegrate into war. People we love sometimes make new decisions, and leave us. Even in the most devoted relationships, one person will die first, and the other will be left behind.
In our human lives, there are three paths we can walk. We can live in the fog of denial, simply choosing not to allow ourselves to think about all the uncertainty. This first path is the one most of us travel.
The second path is cynicism. Some people prefer facing uncertainty head on, and they manage life by expecting little and anticipating the worst.
The third path, the path of highest consciousness, is to recognize not just the facts of life, but the ultimate Truth of life. Yes, on a human level, here in this physical body surrounded by material objects and circumstances, we acknowledge that the only constant is that we will face change.
But we also understand that there is a Truth that underlies these facts. We are more than physical, material beings. We are children of God, manifestations of the Divine in physical form. We have the ability to create reality with our thoughts, and we are constantly creating the lives we live.
The world is a co-creation, and our joint circumstances are projections of the thoughts we are all collectively thinking. Because human beings collectively often operate from feelings of fear and lack, our world often reflects that chaos. One person can have a huge impact in the world, but one person cannot immediately change the overall physical reality.
What we can each do, however, is to retain our perspective and to know, deep in our hearts, that as long as we hold in consciousness the awareness of our Divinity and our connection to God (however we may conceive of God), we are safe. We are secure. We must be willing to release things, circumstances, even people, while remaining confident that we are ultimately protected. Moment to moment, we must lift up our thoughts away from fear, anger and judgment, and put our thoughts on love. We must love ourselves, love everyone else, and remember that as we do, we are loving and affirming our oneness with All that Is, with our God. And therein lies our only, our absolute protection and security.