What is an appropriate state of mind at this time? I try to be a reflective citizen. I would like to have the negative capability that Keats wrote of, but he was writing about Shakespeare. Harold Bloom sees Shakespeare as god-like in his humanity. Nothing wrong with aiming high. As they say, don’t be a Buddhist, be a Buddha. Do Christians have the aspiration to sainthood? I think Thomas Merton suggested that they should.
We could use more prosaic language and talk of a paradigm shift. I was in the bank yesterday, paying in cheques. It was a Friday and I was expecting delays as local small businesses sorted out their cash returns. In fact it was not so bad, a wait of five minutes or so, but a woman ahead of me was saying that it was disgusting, the delay, and she would be writing to head office. I thought: if waiting at the counter is the only difficulty we’ll be facing at this time of potential financial meltdown, then I’ll settle for that.
What other states of mind might be useful? An apocalyptic vision is helpful when everything is collapsing around you. There is a great exhibition at Tate Britain at the moment.
And you need to be paranoid when the others are out to get you. The human skeleton is designing for running, not walking.
We find it hard to think of prosperity without growth. We are not used to facing years of austerity – that is, when we are not going to be reassured all the time that we are getting to be better off than before.
We are hearing all that time that this is the biggest, smallest, hottest, coldest, wettest, driest, fastest, slowest, whatever since ten years ago or twenty, or a hundred years, and increasingly, since records began.
We need mindfulness, to keep in touch with the interconnectivity of all things, but not as a quick fix for depression. There is something about the human condition that we have great ideas, great religions, and we reduce them to a concern about inessentials, what we wear on holy days and rubbish collections and 2p on the price of petrol.