With around 10,000 readers of these Friday essays, there is a high likelihood that a few are Buddhist. When oil hit $0 this week, I thought of the 1983 hit “Saved by Zero” by the band Fixx. Cy Curnin sang lead vocals on the song and, in an interview a dozen years ago, he said:

"It was about looking at your own life, not so much about amassing material things but about experiences that lend you to be blissful... The song was written from the point of view of the release you get when you have nothing left to lose. It’s sort of a meditation. It clears your head of all fears and panics and illusions, and you get back to the basics, which is a Buddhist mantra, which I practiced back then, and which I still do. The idea of the song is how great it is to get back to zero.”

I’m a huge fan of the Fixx and of $100 oil, but I doubt that I’ll ever see either one again. Back in the ‘Eighties the Buddhist manta telegraphed through the song by the Fixx resonated with me because oil was completely in the crapper, companies were evaporating, and I was out of a job, or, as I preferred to call it, Grad School. Clear your head, get back to the basics, don’t amass material things… Yeah, I can do that.

But it was only a song, and it was only a mantra. Pretty shallow, completely frustrating.

Then I read a book and in that book I read a letter where a man named Paul gave a written interview to worried Christians in the town of Philippi, where he said:

“…I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength.”

This $0 oil price stinks. What a punch in the gut, even for those who KEEP their jobs! There is no yardstick, no measuring tape, no depth sonde that puts the actions of this week in the plus category. This is the opposite of plenty, the opposite of well fed.

But the man named Paul who wrote to the Philippians said something two minutes before he talked about being content. You should Google it. It informs my worldview.