Imagine if you will; a bear rising in fury to swoop its tremendous claws down upon your fragile body. This scene is what's often conjured up when we think of "survival" in "nature". This is not a common occurrence for many people (except perhaps wild bear tamers) and yet everyday we are "surviving" in "nature". How possible is it to consider the way we "make a living" to be a practice of surviving in "nature"? One of the peculiar conditions of living a civilized life is that one can feel as if they are "removed from nature". Yet, if we are really removed from "nature" then where do we go? Can we suddenly breathe water and drink air? Or do we transcend biology and become supernatural beings? Hmmn, it is rather more plausible that being "removed from nature" is a form of collective amnesia in which we forget the conditions that make living possible.

What do we need to do in order to be alive? What do we need to do in order to "make a living"? The different answers to these questions may account for the high level of anxiety that most people experience in todays work-force.

Life is the first and most reliable gift that we receive. Are there environments in which we live where we feel like this gift has been taken away? Or that we've lost this gift, or tossed it away, or something else equally shitty? What are the qualities of these shitty-lifeless environments? Why do we continue to live in them? One of the weird things about traumatic experience is that it can feel like the trauma becomes everything. Being depressed is like this, when everything just feels the way it is and can't be any different. Generalizing a particular experience to everything can generate a whole lot of boredom; a hypersensitive boredom. Meanwhile, the refusal to perceive patterns between different things can make us senseless. For instance, anytime a connection is made between the world's petroleum resources and war in the "middle east" somebody calls it a "conspiracy theory". The roots of the word conspire mean, "to breathe together" and a theory is a framework for understanding - so conspiracy theories are really our basic way of interacting with each other. Yet, because much of our language does not support the complex, contradictory, and interdependent experiences through which we make up the world, we lack the technology to articulate the patterns which connect us all. A few thousand years ago, when the innovation of scarcity was developed, it became possible to think that one can own and control life. This innovation sparked millennia of rapid change for human beings who spread to all corners of the earth, expanding their settlements in order to support all the people. Today, we are seeing the peak of these settlement patterns as we "run out" of the resources for continuous expansion. At this point from the top of the peak, we can look down both ways; to where we came from and where we are going. Here we are, surveying the territory of our collective imagination; in memory and dreams for the future. From this vantage point how do we make sense of our current occupations?

It is hard to think really clearly when we're scared shitless. Fear is a very efficient way of reducing conceptual variety (different ways of thinking). Yet, we live in a panic infrastructure. Civilization is built on panic as an extension of scarcity. Our houses, roads, schools, hospitals, farms, government offices, marketplaces are actually built out of fear. Fear of losing a job, fear of not making it in the world, fear of dying, fear of chaotic hordes of rebellious people, fear of being beaten, killed or raped, fear of looking scared. At this point we need to accept the consequences of millennia of slavery, forced labor, war, and the general subordination of most people for the expansion of human settlements. Yet, how do we accept our present history when it is so scary? Wisdom suggests an awareness of the total circuitry of a system, including the functions and limitations of our awareness. Of course, there is also the fact that most of human experience and human history is built on happiness, fun, hope; in short, love. If this wasn't the case we wouldn't be here right now with these words. Love is the fundamental condition of acceptance. So it seems that panic wisdom is our ability to simultaneously perceive the collapse of "life as we know it" while caring for the conditions that make living possible. Indeed, as a collective of humanity, panic wisdom can help regulate our work-life balance.