I Am Happier To Know You

Since the bottom dropped out of the financial security my husband and I worked our whole lives to achieve, I have had to go deep inside to look at a lot of stuff I haven’t wanted to see. Compassion toward everyone has been a biggie.

Since 2000 I’ve been saying privately that the U.S. economy was heading for deep do-do. To me, the first warning sign was the low-yield interest rates for savings that Greenspan kept adjusting downward. I’m not an economist. I can’t count that high. Neither am I clever enough to fudge figures until they agree with my assessment.

Of course, with the exception of a friend who was an economist, everyone thought I was nuts. Then I watched as home prices and rents went through the roof, not just in the U.S. but everywhere I’ve lived in the world. I also watched everyone around me buying whatever they wanted simply because they wanted it therefore talked themselves into needing it.

As the national debt soared, I began to quietly ask “If our government is spending more than it’s raking in, and consumers are doing the same, how can the bottom not drop out of the economy?” It seemed pretty clear to me that everyone had to stop living beyond their means, pay off their debt and look at why things are so important to them.

What I didn’t factor in is the other side of the mess: there are people around the world who will do anything to take what isn’t theirs. They’re the ones, like our landlord in Mumbai who made it his trademark to not pay the poorest of the poor for months of work. I had compassion lapses for them until they began to pretend to fix things and to steal from me to make up for not being paid when they did do good work.

I have had trouble feeling compassion for the idiots who bought properties they couldn’t afford and didn’t read the fine print on their loan documents. Ignorance is not a viable defense for greed fostered by the stupidity of thinking about what we want, rather than what we can afford.

The actions of the Madoff’s of the world is beyond comprehension, but a level of responsibility belongs to their clients who were making returns on their investments they knew were beyond economic reality.

So maybe it all comes down to greed and a worldwide sense of entitlement to grab the sticky brass ring, no matter what the consequences to our spirits and ethics.

Maybe this whole mess is about being faced with the need to look ourselves in the mirrors and to see how we have contributed to it either as passive or proactive participants. It all boils down to accepting responsibility for everything we create and for failing to care as much about each other and doing the right thing as we do about “things.”

Our world is a place where those who are rich or comfortable look at those of a different caste, class, race, or nationality as being obviously undeserving of what they have achieved. Worldwide, the middle and upper classes are suffering terribly. Their idea of what their life would be has begun to be replaced with “what is.” And the poorest of the poor, they’re not even surviving and even fewer care if they do.

I’m working on expanding my compassion quotient to include the thieves, the stupid and the greedy. We’re human beings and the most important message the world may have ever received from this mess is that we all make mistakes, we all make choices and we can change if we want to. Perhaps the place to begin is to care about and help each other.

Challenges are always opportunities. We’ve got them and the best opportunities may be found outside ourselves within our own communities.

If we step outside our personal pity parties and “me first” mentalities, there are a million ways we can help someone less fortunate than we are financially or morally. Maybe it begins with compassion.

Copyright 2009 by Jeanne M. Eck. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint or to quote extensively from this article, please contact the author at iamhappiertoknowyou.com

Now that we’re living in Mexico City, it has become easierfor family and friends to visit us from the U.S.

We recently finished a two-week visit with Chuck’s parents. It was wonderful! Not only did we have the chance to get to know each other better, more importantly I had the privilege of setting aside my “normal” life to concentrate on making their visit a memorable one.

Before they arrived, I was surprised by how many expatriate women found it necessary to offer me condolences rather than blessings for the upcoming visit. I was shocked that not one woman expressed gratitude for the role her husbands family played in creating the man she married. Neither did they acknowledge that his family has earned the right to be included in their lives and that their family history is as worthy of respect as theirs is.

Women of all ages shared their “in-law woes” and couldn’t understand why I was so positive about the impending visit. I tried to explain that I saw it as an opportunity to express, in a small way, my gratitude for their bringing their son into the world and helping to shape him into the kind, gentle, loving man I married.  In turn, Chuck was thrilled to have time together and for them to see why he loves me. I don’t know if they did, but what I do know is that their visit was precious and I’m grateful for every meal I cooked and the time we spent together on day trips, at home and in our garden.

When so many families are being torn apart by the inability to embrace and respect their respective partner’s heritage, or to express gratitude for the love a new family member brings to their child, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we put aside our issues and truly open our hearts to appreciating each other? It could begin by just saying “thank you.”

Copyright 2009 by Jeanne M. Eck. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint or to quote extensively from this article, kindly contact the author at iamhappiertoknowyou.com

It’s not that individual Indians aren’t kind, generous and wonderful friends, they are. It’s that the society as a whole is oblivious to the horrific ramifications of century-old practices of karma, the caste system and the reality that the depth of skin color identifies others as inferior or superior. On some level, it’s the same story worldwide practiced with different cultural twists.

While we were horrified by the Mumbai bombings, we weren’t surprised. Having lived there for two years, we watched the continued escalation of violence by Hindu fundamentalists against Muslims.

India touts interreligious respect as a national way of life, just as they do the Madison Avenue hype that India is the IT center of the world when it isn’t.

India is a country of beauty and indescribable horrors. It suffers from a deteriorated infrastructure, the highest level of infant and maternal mortality, the murder or abortion of female babies because families of daughters are expected to kneel to the whims of the grooms’ families by paying outrageous dowries or risk having their daughters burned alive, malnutrition, and horrendous graft and corruption.

The long, dehumanizing occupation by Great Britain left them so scared that rather than collectively being the kind gentle people they are individually, a false pride defined as  power, wealth  and security (acquired at any cost, including murder) boils not beneath, but steams into the culture.

Rather than projecting responsibility for the siege of Mumbai on Pakistan, India needs to stop pointing fingers and fists and look within to heal what could be healed if love, rather than hate takes a backseat.

Copyright 2009 by Jeanne M. Eck. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint or to quote extensively from this article, please contact the author at iamhappiertoknowyou.com

In the past, I’ve written about how our fear of loss and safety sabotages our lives by bringing to our doorsteps exactly what we fear most and how every unkind, compassionless action is merely an extension of a fear we carry as individuals or as a group.

As the New Year beckons with worldwide economic, ecological and humane crises’ on a scale that impacts every living being, our fears are being reflected back to us by events in our personal lives and by those around the world.

I wonder if individual fears of not having enough, of not being loveable, of lacking personal power are the primary sources of the collapse of the world’s economy. They’re a slice of the same global fear apple.

When we live with a focus of greed or a thirst for love that can never be sated, our energies are focused on how to get more of what we think we lack. In the process, we lose touch with the compassionate, generous parts of ourselves that are masked by acts that eschew our humanity.

So what if we make money from fake pharmaceuticals or products tainted by deadly fillers? So what if we take out loans we can never repay and our irresponsibility causes those who have worked their whole lives saving and living within their means lose everything? So what if by stealing from the poor or treating others as if they are less than human causes them to live on the street or in refugee camps? It’s just karma or devaluing others. We earned the right to our good life. They didn’t.

The devastation of our environment is perhaps another manifestation of greed. So what if polluting for profit takes away clean water from those who have little else, destroys ecosystems and creates global warming? If we make enough money, we delude ourselves into believing that we can buy whatever we need—forever and that our needs always come first.

Fear of personal and collective safety enables us to dehumanize our “enemies” so it is easier to righteously declare that we are exercising our right to protect ourselves when we kill them. “An eye for an eye” isn’t about “doing unto others as we would have them do unto us,” it’s about me first. After all, one of “them” is worth a hundred or a thousand of “us.”

We take no responsibility for how our collective racial, religious and socioeconomic fear-based actions co-create what we have come to fear most: rage that wears the mask of terrorism.

In this New Year of atrocious challenges, there are beautiful opportunities to heal not only ourselves, but the world as a whole. Everything we do, think and say has an impact on everyone around us and, by extension, the world.

When we see, face and heal our fears as individuals and human beings, we create energy that touches every corner of the world with love that empowers others to do the same.  Perhaps the most important slogan for 2009 is “Yes! We can stamp out fear.”

Copyright 2009 by Jeanne M. Eck. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint or to quote extensively from this article, please contact the author at iamhappiertoknowyou.com