Oprah: What I know for sure (about the economy)

Oprah's column in the holiday issue of O Magazine:

The economy is in flux, and so are we. For years I've noticed that the universe speaks to us in whispers. If we ignore the whispers, we get pebbles of warning.  If we still don't pay attention, we get bricks of problems, and if we're really hardheaded, eventually the entire brick wall comes crashing down. This is a pattern I've seen repeated so often in every area of life that I know for sure when you don't pay attention to the pebbles, it's just a matter of time before the bricks show up.

Our nation's financial crisis is the brick wall that's going to force us to deal with the reality of what truly matters. And to face the spiritual crisis of figuring out who we are and who we choose to be.

Our spending and greed for material things that we think will define us have been forcibly put in check. We have a wake-up-call opportunity to get real and be real with others by finding ways to show love, give love, be love without spending a lot of money. It's a chance for us to look beneath the surface, into the culture of excessive more, more, more-ness that got us into this mess.

It will take more than a bailout to get us on the right track. We need a shift in the way we think about our lives. We may have to search deeply to recognize what matters. Sometimes when I ask people what it would take to make them happy, they don't know what to say. They forge an answer about family and friends, and yet their lives are about everything else.

Everything in life has meaning. The bigger the fall, the greater the lesson.

Barn's burnt down -

Now I can see the moon.

-Masahide (17th century poet)

Oprah