It has been the end of the world as we know it nearly my whole life.

The economic news has been unsettling the past few weeks. I don’t know what’s going to happen and I worry about the future as much as anyone.

When I was a kid my parents did a pretty good job of filtering out the worst of the evening news so I lived through the Vietnam war era without it registering much, but I remember the rest of the 70s as one long decade of inflation, oil crisis and anxiety, capped by the taking of American hostages in Iran.

I lived in Europe in the 80s and people I worked with were actively worried that Reagan was going to do something to get us all blown up. During a particularly tense conflict with Libya, my friends and I had a pact to meet at a certain restaurant for one last good spaghetti carbonara if it appeared the end was nigh.

The 90s started out rocky. The large company I worked for at the start of the decade was gone by 1996 and although I landed on my feet, my confidence in the corporate life was irrevocably shaken.

By 2002 the “safe” corporation I worked for was also floundering and as one of a handful of telecommuters, I lost that job. They are struggling to this day so I’m pretty sure their problems are more related to general mismanagement than anything I was doing. Now that I’ve been a small business owner for a few years, I wonder how any large corporation can do it. Well, they need access to credit, I guess, and that’s why we are currently reaching the end of the world.

I have a Post-It note on the wall next to my desk that reads “Don’t Panic!” — a quote from the book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams. I glance at it throughout the day and remind myself to stay calm and that whatever happens next, the sun will still shine and we will find our way through it all. I have a lot of faith that we will grow stronger as a community as a result of these times.

We have a friend staying with us for a while. I’m not sure how long he will be here, but he’s an easy person to be around and our house is built in a way that he can be at one end watching a movie on the surround system and I can be at the other, not really aware that anyone else is home.

What I mean is having him here isn’t really any trouble, and sometimes it has a surprising benefit. For example, yesterday he cooked a really great root vegetable stew for dinner. It was nice to come “home” from the office (a short walk across the breezeway) to find a large pot of something that smelled delicious bubbling on the stove in the warm kitchen.

Last night after dinner we were talking about how life seems to be such a huge struggle for me right now. It’s been that way for a year, but lately it seems to have heightened again and I feel overwhelmed and fearful.

Somehow in our conversation last night we got on the topic of the old song “Row, row, row your boat.” David, our friend, was saying how the song seems to be childish babble, but it is really has a deeper subliminal message. Think about it.

Row, row, row your boat … that’s three “rows”: you have to work at life

Gently down the stream … okay, you have to work, but steer that boat downstream, not up. And go easy, do it gently.

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily … ah, not sullenly, not indifferently, but with a light heart and good humor

Life is but a dream … stop taking it all so seriously

I’ll try to remember this simple tune as I start another day.