When the going gets tough

Hi neighbors. Another week is behind us and the future lies in wait.

I have found that when things seem a bit overwhelming, it pays to try to imagine myself looking at the earth from orbit. We've all seen those photos taken from space of our beautiful planet.

Just that image helps me get things in perspective when I take a few moments of quiet reflection.

Zooming in on this imaginary picture, I always find North America first, the USA, then Missouri, and finally hone in on Nevada.

Once I've found this base, I take time to look around the rest of the planet a bit. Have you seen photos taken from a small airplane or helicopter? You know how they skim along over the ground. I like to use those types of images to imagine myself traveling the world.

I always pass over Africa and see the thousands of people starving there. In today's world there are people starving everywhere. Newspaper clips run through my mind of how so many go hungry each day.

Continuing my little mental "tour" of the rest of the globe, I think of people who live in dictatorships, countries dominated by a single religion's dogmas or places where women or minorities have no voice and little hope for change.

The tiny spot on the world where I live is pretty sheltered and secure. But with the recession growing larger and larger, more of us are going to start seeing a different world. A world where the strong struggle to survive and those who can't see the changes coming are going to be facing a harsh new reality.

For most of us, imagining a world both cold and indifferent is almost impossible. We have never known real fear of our government, hunger for weeks on end, or indifference to our needs by those who are moving around us.

We grew up on "happily ever after" endings and "we can do it!" mantras. We take a lot for granted.

Have you ever stubbed your toe and spent so much time complaining about your bad luck, who left the whatever in the way and moaning the popular "why me?" lament? Hopefully you later reflected and remembered there are people with no feet.

What about food? Have you ever grumbled about the taste of something you've cooked, the quality of the ingredients, or even the cooking pot or the limitations of the stove? Maybe later, after your belly was full, you realized there are people who seldom eat and are never full. Other people have to walk miles each day just to gather enough wood to have a cooking fire.

We all complain about our shoes and clothing; too little, too big, too out of season, wrong color or wrong style. While looking in our bulging closets we should think of those people who don't have a heavy coat for the winter or shoes for their feet.

Most of our houses are generally effective at keeping the rain off our heads, the cold off our feet and the wind outside our door. There are people sleeping on the streets, some in cardboard boxes, others on the ground without benefit of any protection from the elements.

Most of us have cars, trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, or at least bicycles to get around town or back and forth to work. Some people walk -- everywhere -- or they stay home and wait for someone else to come for them. Some just lie down on the ground when they run out of strength to go further.

These people dislike doing without things just like we do. But they didn't grow up thinking things just HAD to get better because they felt for some reason they deserved better.

With the hard times most surely ahead of us, we need to start thinking with more realistic mind-sets.

Our self-reliant pioneer ancestors had one: "Make do with what you have, make what you need or do without." They were never given any guarantees that they would survive the hardships life threw at them, they never expected any. We, on the other hand, seem to think life owes us a living; that just existing should qualify us for a good life.

Maybe it's time we all realized there may not be anyone or any government that can promise us all we want, or even all we need.

Until the next time friends remember it is a big world out there and as important as we are to ourselves, we are each just another one of billions. Survival is never guaranteed, not even to the smart and the strong. Time to toughen up and get going America!