Utagawa Hiroshige 歌川 広重
Mishima: Morning Mist (Mishima, asagiri),
from the series “Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido Road
(Tokaido gojusan tsugi no uchi),” also known as the Hoeido Tokaido
(c. 1833/34)

"…neither liquid nor solid, but mist."

A surprising period of Thawing typically follows one of my frozen-in-the-headlights-without-the-benefit-of-headlights experiences. Whatever had so effectively inhibited me from engaging dissipates. Not all at once, and never quite completely, but a few openings appear out of what had previously seemed like blinding, inhibiting, frozen mist. I climbed the ladder. I harvested the fruit I’d feared I’d left to rot. My world seemed to right itself, or at least start moving in that general direction. Moving! I accomplished something! I once again sense that I possess actual latitude for action. I feel capable of choosing, at least on a limited basis. I can choose, then I can choose again, and I recognize the fundamental cycling that underpins my Prosperity; for what was Prosperity if not the sense that I might choose more or less freely, that I was less imprisoned in my world than I was an intermittent master of it?

I first sense a loss of Prosperity as a limiting of choices. What seemed achievable before suddenly seems absolutely out of reach. What was in my power has fallen beyond it, and I feel relatively powerless. I’ve never experienced absolute helplessness, but I need not inhabit any absolute to sense the absence. Sensing such absences amounts to a negative power. It doesn’t produce anything but emptiness. It might have produced sadness, but seemed only capable of delivering an absence of happiness, which was never once the same substance. I might find the time, but I fail to locate the motivation required to use that time. I might well seem stuck in some headlights without the spurious benefit of headlights even being present to witness the experience.

A gain of Prosperity feels inherently reassuring, regardless of whether it seems absolute or relatively humble. Latitude for action enters the equation then, and a sense of self-determination results, as if it was never that I was powerless so much as that I had temporarily lost the ability to imagine how powerful I might become. If I had been suffering from some sort of depression, I understand. What could more effectively sap my motivation than to lose my sense of personal Prosperity? This sensation had more to do with my expectations than it ever had to do with my wealth. Prosperity might simply be a measure of some sense of possibility. In this calculus, I remain wealthy just as long as I can sustain an adequate sense of potential. That sense doesn’t seem to even need to become a reality. Just the presence of that sense of possibility might fuel the totality of the Prosperity experience. I remain prosperous just as long as I sense the authority to realize possibilities. Losing that sense produces penury.

I was frozen in more than absent headlights, but absolutely in space and time. Once I climbed that ladder and started picking that long-neglected fruit, though, I could feel an opening appearing. I could feel some power returning, a re-emerging authority to choose. It seems banal to believe that the universe runs on choice. Choice seems to be anything but superpower material, yet I have come to believe that I am the “sum” total of at least my choices. Much more certainly gets involved, but choosing seems to prime an engine. Choosing then acting produces momentum of the sort that freezing in the headlights, even without any headlights present, effectively precludes. Any choice taken might threaten to thaw the effectively frozen. Even the tiniest imaginable choice taken then seems capable of inspiring a Thawing.

The next day, after finally climbing that ladder and picking, I watched myself start choosing again. I had inherited a semi-sacred responsibility by then, to process those sweet little Mirabelle plums into wine. This would take some time, require an investment, and demand that I commit to making a long series of potentially discomfiting choices. Who am I to presume that I might successfully ferment those backyard plums into wine? The very notion seems audacious, but I have The Muse, who has always been much better at choosing her way through confusing options than I. She produced a grand recipe for me to follow, and she’s present to help with interpretation. Together, then, we might manage to ferment our way into a fresh Prosperity to, if not necessarily replace our ProsperityLost, but to create some renewing replacement sense of possibility found. Prosperity must almost exclusively exist in some future. Nobody might ever actually capture and hold it in any individual present. It promises and allures and reassures before utterly disappearing, either subsumed by overrunning possibilities or frozen somewhere, with or without the questionable benefit of headlights. Prosperity might, then, be a more or less continuous Thawing, freezing up before regaining temporarily suspended possibilities, neither liquid nor solid, but mist.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz