Following up on yesterday's theme, trying to find some silver linings in current economic news, I stumbled across this piece on the Huffington Post website. It's an opinion piece, on the theme of America's "awakening". But it's not just America, of course. Many in the West, and beyond, are waking up - to what they've spent, what they owe and what they've lost in the process. The latter is an interesting theme - one that the author of the Huffington Post column says she's going to pursue in the weeks to come. The big question of course is whether and how we can recover what we've lost, find meaning beyond consumerism and achieve a more sustainable lifestyle. At the end of the day, we each have to answer that for ourselves...