Ending and Beginning

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve worked extra-hard to separate my thoughts at work from what’s happening in the world. At work, I think about my job and the tasks at hand, I immerse myself in the world of computers and software and rules and releases and what’s allowed and what’s not. I think of business as usual and pretend to believe that what is now will always be.

That’s as it should and must be, even through it’s weird. I can’t forget that my job is an important part of our prepping. If we didn’t have a decent disposable income, we wouldn’t be able to afford any of the stuff we need to buy. If we had to pay all of our own health insurance, for example, we wouldn’t be able to get ready for the future at all.

And so I spend five days in a kind of denial of what I believe and of what is happening in the world, then, on Friday, I emerge from my cocoon and open my eyes. That separation of work and life not only helps me keep my job, it also reduces the depression and stress that could result from thinking about the next ten years too much. But every Friday it feels as if all the systems of the world — energy, political, economic, climatic — have lost more resiliency and become more fragile.

The feeling expressed in that last sentence…is it because I see more of a change in a week’s time than I noticed when immersing myself in it every day? Is the outlook actually deteriorating faster? Or am I just freaking myself out more effectively than I used to? Or perhaps all those global declines — in the energy, political, economic, and climatic systems — are combining with my thoughts and feelings about the rest of my life, possibly declining health, my boys’ futures, approaching retirement, and, eventually, death, to set off the alarms in my head.