Transitions

I realized yesterday afternoon that it was time to turn the calendar page.  Yes, we are now in the throes of October, officially beginning the final three months of 2010.  For me, October has often been a melancholy month, in part because the days get light later and dark earlier once the autumn solstice has passed.

October has also often been a personal transition month for me.  I first consciously realized this in 1978, when I happened to be reading Gail Sheehy's Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life just after having made significant transitions in the preceding July-August-September period.  After receiving a divorce that ended a 13-year marriage, I had uprooted my young sons and even some of the family pets from Montana to Arizona to spend a year studying for a graduate degree while on sabbatical leave from my teaching position.  While most of those transitions had not actually occurred in October, it was in October that I had some time to take stock of all that had happened during the rather tumultuous three-month period preceding it.  Similarly, October 1980 was my stock-taking moment after a transatlantic move from Montana to Morocco that also involved new employment.  My long-suffering sons and the family dog accompanied me on this second adventure as well.  It was intended to last for three years.  That particular set of transitions ended up changing all our lives forever in ways that we never could have imagined - at least not during that particular October.

The most significant transitions that resulted in my current lifestyle occurred in October 1994, when HWMBO and I first came to Switzerland together.  At the time, my projection was that our stay here would last from three to five years.  In fact, funding for the institution that had engaged my services was on shaky footing, to say the least, so the move could have resulted in our departure much earlier.  Prospects were so short-term at the time that we could never have imagined that our stay here would last for the 16 years it has!  Had we been able to see the future, we would certainly have invested in real estate here 16 years ago because it would have cost a lot less in the long term than our rentals!  As it happened, I got a realistic second bite at the real estate apple late in October 2005 and snapped at it - although with a very big gulp.  And not without significant qualms.

In hindsight, that turned out to be an extremely fortuitous financial decision because that real estate has since appreciated.  It also helped that the USD exchange rate for the amount that I had to convert for the purchase was significantly higher at the time.   Like so many others with funds that were invested in equities and securities to aid us in our retirement lifestyle, we have watched with dismay verging on horror the various global financial crises.  The absence of ethics and scruples in those who had fiduciary obligations but appropriated and squandered the funds of others for their own whimsy and pleasure - gambling that their Day of Reckoning would never come has been particularly disappointing, as was the failure of Government oversight.  Institutions were in place but were simply not allowed to function as they should have because it did not suit those in power at the time.  When the Day of Reckoning did come, those same scam artists - who without fail preach caveat emptor and "free markets" to others and who consider those who live in poverty to be there by choice - were the first to beg for Government-sponsored taxpayer bailouts, which in most instances translated into billions of dollars received with no strings attached.  Today, the USD is trading almost at parity with the Swiss franc (CHF).

While the financial crises are indeed global, there is no denying the significant role of the unregulated market capitalism and shock doctrine-enforced "democracies" that principals from my own country have fostered at the expense of captive populations, including its own.  Thanks a lot, scam artists and worse!  Many of us are growing impatient with waiting for the "mills of God" to do their grinding.  To this end, there will be demonstrations in the US today, a fact that was barely worthy of mention in the rightward-leaning Washington Post, which unceasingly gives disproportionate coverage to anything with a whiff of Tea Baggery.  Even the New York Times finds other news more important to report.  It's eerily similar to how the MSM virtually ignored the millions who protested the war in Iraq in 2003.  Let's see whether they report anything about this tomorrow and, if so, whether it will be with the habitually disparaging bias they use towards progressives.   

Whether transitions are for better or for worse, they inevitably lead at least to physical shifts in geographical location, lifestyle, health conditions and choices, among others, even if only for a short while.  They can also lead to universal shifts in perspective and spiritual outlook.  Given my own experience with transitions in October, that include changes in employment, international relocations, losses of loved ones, major surgeries, travel and so forth, it is no wonder that I greet the month with some melancholy.  Still, given my experience, even that melancholy is tempered with anticipation rather than foreboding.