Financial dustbowls and the inner life

Someone asked me this question the other day and it’s very topical. What if your income has disappeared because your job has gone, your home is in danger of being repossessed, and thus you are in danger of losing everything you thought you had secured by your efforts over the last however many years? What good will concentrating on your inner life do then?

As I see it, there are three parts to the answer. First off, the inner life is a question of attitude. Practicing the skills of the inner life is like reinforcing that attitude until it comes naturally. Imagine a person who could meet financial catastrophe with equanimity, accepting of course that there were practical problems to be met and dealt with, but certain that they had no bearing on what really mattered in that person’s life, on the central values they held to, on past achievements or the person’s sense of worth. (A deeply religious person might feel like this, which is one reason why we should leave other peoples’ beliefs intact if they are not hurting anyone, even if they seem strange or irrational to us.) Whatever came next, which could be rescue by government action or penury or something in between, would be just what happened next: the person would do their best to influence events but would be realistic about what they could achieve and would recognise that luck, good or bad, would play a large part. That person would be in far better shape, I think, than someone for whom this was a shattering personal blow, striking at the heart of their values, their self image and their self respect.

How you take things matters hugely, whether the things that happen are good or bad, fortunate or unfortunate. A lot of what people call looking for meaning in their lives is a search for a context in which they can make sense of what happens to them. This often means a context in which they can accept that, yes, that happened and I wish it hadn’t, there was no fault of mine in it but there it is, let’s get on with life. (Or, something which is much harder to do: that happened and I wish it hadn’t. I could have prevented it, but there it is, let’s get on with life.) Too often we spend time and effort bemoaning our fate and looking for the culprit to be punished or restitution to be made. Sometimes that is possible and we can and should pursue it, it’s only sensible, but often it is an abstraction. We want “Justice” but we live in an unjust world and so the desire for things to be different eats away at us. (“Ajust” , by the way, would be better than “unjust” if it was a word, like the difference between amoral and immoral.)

The second part of the answer is that if a person does not look at things with equanimity they cannot just turn it on by flicking a switch. It is something to be slowly built up by self awareness and practice, probably over many years. So if you cannot meet with disaster and treat it as an imposter, on a par with triumph as Kipling recommended, that is just how it is. It might be that the shock of this event causes you to re-evaluate your priorities and re-assess your values and perhaps you will use it to begin to practice inner skills. Perhaps the event will impress on you the sheer contingency of your material and financial stability, so that you look around for something else on which to base your happiness. In that case, you might come to the view that your inner life matters more than you thought.

The third part of the answer is that the inner life is not all there is. I emphasise it because it is generally neglected in our society and I want the pendulum to swing back to a sensible balance point. But of course external circumstances matter, especially when an external disaster strikes. We would not think that the effects of an earthquake or a hurricane were trivial or unimportant and it is not different when the disaster is man made. Think of the Oklahoma dustbowl of the nineteen-thirties, when agricultural mistakes allowed prairie topsoil to be blown away causing massive social and economic disruption. What we have today is like a financial dustbowl. So of course someone in this position will do all they can to mitigate the effects, they don’t need telling. They will seek help and advice, they will try to act with others to create political pressure, they will try to get another income, they will make economies. They will need all their ingenuity, all their resourcefulness, all their determination to get through it. If these are not included in my list of inner skills it is because they are externally directed character traits, but many of the same considerations apply - they are skills which some have naturally more than others but which need to be practiced and honed throughout life because we never know when we may need them.

So, external problems need external action, either to solve them or to deal with their external effects as best we can. How such problems affect us inwardly is a matter of our inner skills, a major challenge to our inner skills but also an opportunity. Our happiness depends on the balance between the two, but if the externals have already gone to hell in a handcart only the inner skills can prevent misery. If externals never challenged us we might live our lives quite happily without strong inner skills. If we were lucky enough always to master external problems something similar might apply, with a few alarms along the way. If we had immensely strong inner skills, on the other hand, nothing external would ruffle our composure. But if we are normal people living normal lives we will get our fair share of bad luck, natural and man-made disasters and personal tragedies. Then the skillfulness of our inner lives as well as our resourcefulness in the world will determine how well we cope. That’s why it matters so much to practice inner skills when everything is fine.