For my weekly writing spot on this site, see the One-Minute Mystic, with a new meditation posted every Monday. Also see The Village, the story of Misty Longings, England's most beautiful village, posted episode by episode earlier this year.       Next year, I will almost certainly earn less than this year. It's an unwanted predicament but one I regard as my inalienable human right. Like farmers, freelancers have no very assured income. It could be a good year; it could be a terrible year depends on the hand fate deals. And so also like farmers, we are told to diversify as much as possible. As one wise man told me over a cappuchino, "As a freelance, Simon, you must have at least four income streams because at any given moment, at least two of them are about to disappear." It was both kind and truthful advice though at the time, I was struggling for just one stream; so four seemed a City of Light set on a very distant hill. It seemed particularly distant at the beginning of this year. In January, I was well ahead of everyone else in the race towards financial meltdown. But then the change. While things got worse for certain large (and now non-existent) financial institutions, things got better for me. While Wall Street was collapsing, Simon Street was doing quite well. Suddenly I had four income streams, and one was nearly a river! But next year, I will almost certainly earn less; that is both my autumn prediction, and my inalienable right. For a sense of season is what it is to be human. And as the writer of Ecclesiastes knows, only a fool loses touch with the seasons whether they are emotional, physical, meteorological, spiritual or financial. Things come and then they go. That is how life works. Or to reframe that more positively things go; and then something else comes. And so as I see some professional bodies limbering up to complain about below-inflation pay settlements, I do worry for them. It's not that I don't understand. I understand completely! Having more, rather than less, is exciting for at least five minutes; maybe even ten. But is it all worth the lost sense of season? Because either we have the seasons or we don't. Summer, autumn, winter and spring they are a creative package, each blessing the other; and each enjoyed in relationship to the other. No one would want all autumn for where's the joy in letting go, if you neither have anything nor expect anything? We can only let go of something we've held; and always in order to receive something else. But then no one would want just spring either: all the sprouting promise and possibility of young green shoots but no maturing. What a bleak tease that would all be! Which brings us back to pay settlements. If my pay rise must be above inflation, then I am in danger of becoming that most pale and insubstantial of things not a man for all seasons, but a man for just one: "I consume, therefore I am." The strong possibility that I will earn less next year is my inalienable human right. I'd prefer it wasn't. But the alternative is a bleaker abyss by far. More writings © Simon Parke