Abundant challenges face us in navigating a whitewater world. The challenge is a little easier to address when (to quote the Beatles) we “get a little help from our friends.” These “friends” can be other people in our life. They provide both support and ideas. In an environment of safety, we are likely to find this support, along with the willingness to take risks and disclose thoughts and feelings about our whitewater environment. It is with this support and the courage to navigate the whitewater environment with a commitment to significant learning that we find a reason to be realistically optimistic and discover a viable pathway to authentic happiness.
The Shadow
As repeated often in a famous radio mystery show, “the shadow knows.” The shadow knows what we want to avoid. To borrow from an old Cole Porter tune, the shadow also knows that we are “strangely attracted” to that which we try to avoid. There is regret if we successfully avoid the shadow, for we wonder what it would be like to probe deeper into our psyche. There is also regret if we are successfully attracted to the shadow, for it pulls us into deep recesses of our psyche.
The shadow is represented in the chasm that we find when confronted with money and wealth. There is the great chasm of Ungrund first identified by Jacob Boehme, and later portrayed by Nicholai Berdyaev (Berdyaev, 1960; Berdyaev, 2023) This is a deep, primal state in which absolute freedom resides. It is in our freedom to gain and loss money that we find ourselves facing the ungrund chasm of uncertainty. We are free to lose all of our money, and must then ask, “What do I do now?” “How do I live without a financial safety net!”). The ungrund chasm of freedom also accompanies our accumulation of money. We are free to prosper financially, but must then ask: “Is that all there is? Is this what happiness looks like?)
For Berdyaev, the state of ungrund precedes any structure or order created by a God or a society. Under these conditions of absolute freedom there is no fundamental meaning or value to be assigned to money or wealth. One is facing a chasm not only of uncertainty, but also of meaninglessness (“nothingness”) regarding money. It is just a piece of paper or a line in the monthly bank statement. One is “free” to add meaning and value to this piece of paper and financial statement; however, ultimately value and meaning are absent from the currency we hold and the bank statement we review. A shadow of ungrund is cast over the entire sense of financial wealth.
The monetary shadow is also found in Sören Kierkegaard’s (1980) existential portrayal of deep fathoms of water on which we sail in our small, vulnerable boat. This is the psychological representation of our experience of negative utility (greatly amplified). There is a small dent in the landscape and a bit of a puddle when we pick the broccoli without the stems. A slightly bigger dent and bigger puddle are to be found when we test out the negative utility associated with choosing a small sportscar rather than a modest “family car” (we are paying for the less space in the sports car).
