'Barn’s burnt down. Now I can see the moon'

As the story goes, this actually happened to Mizuta Masahide, 17th century samurai poet in the Zeze domain of Ohmi Province, Japan.

His barn did burn down. But instead of lamenting his fate, he wrote this famous haiku.

It is the exact opposite of our usual reaction to trouble, summed up in the pop poem:

Poor me
poor me
pour me
another drink.

While Masahide reputedly loved to drink, he apparently did not like to cry in his beer, or perhaps it was sake.

Masahide's attitude toward his troubles might be helpful to those of us who have been hit hard by this recession/depression/collapse of Western Civilization or whatever you want to call it.

For example:

At 62, laid off from my job at the Technology News Factory since December, and looking at an economy where there are five seekers for every available job, I can either bemoan my fate or start collecting Social Security.

Because I am unemployed and at my age probably unemployable in the youth-oriented job market, I can now realize my 1960s dream to sit watching the river flow, drinking wine and writing haiku.

My generation,
aging hippies, finally
tunes in and drops out.