They say it happened during the last Great Depression: stock brokers who’d lost it all jumping out of highrise windows in financial districts. People who were suddenly forced to change their lifestyles radically because they’d lost everything by which they’d heretofore identified themselves, their “wealth.”

Myself, I’ve always been poor. I grew up poor. I’ve lived on my own poor. I know what it’s like. I know what it takes. When you’ve always been on the bottom, there’s no fear of falling because there’s nowhere to fall to. But I don’t have a bunch of stocks and bonds and whatever else people out there have. I don’t have any real estate. I don’t have any savings. I don’t have anything but my own two hands and the shirt on my back. And if I lose that, well it wouldn’t be the first time.

The thing about having nothing is that it’s not all that scary. You’re only scared when you have something to lose. You only feel insecure when you’re trying to hoard, control and hold onto. Let everything go and some might say you’ve found true freedom. That notion might be a bit hard to swallow though for people in the middle and upper middle class who’ve worked their whole lives to carve out a little slice for themselves, only to have it all taken away on account of higher-ups giving each other financial handjobs in baroque executive bathrooms. But the thing about life is that oftentimes when it happens to you, you have no choice. Sure you can pick out the small stuff a lot of times, but the really tremendous events that impact all of us like a meteor falling from space (of which I think we’re about to see at least the metaphorical commitment) just happen out of the blue. Black Swam events they call it. Unseen, unpredicted, unprepared for. Suddenly you’re just dealing with it and that’s that.

Epictetus, a Greek philosopher, spoke of the “sphere of the moral purpose,” by which I take him to mean that you can’t or can’t always control outward events. The only thing as a man, as a free human being, that you can preside over is your own reaction to events, the attitude you take towards them. A friend of mine would always quote an Aikido teacher of his: “Your pain is caused by your resistance to what is.” Accept and adapt. Move on. What once was built can be re-built. I will destroy this temple made with hands, and in three days I will build another made without hands. What you rebuild of your life may never match the shape of everything you lost, but like Gandalf, you’ll come out renewed, transfigured, more powerful.

The moral of the story may simply be this: if your over-arching fear right now vis-a-vis the economy is losing everything in a catastrophic crash, well you’re not going to guarantee your safety by worrying. In fact, there is no guarantee period. If you want to deal with the fear of losing everything though, give it all away first - before they have a chance to take it away from you. When you lose everything you’ve known as a matter of conscious choice, than it being fearfully ripped from your hands, then you end up the winner no matter what. And no one can take that away from you.