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So there I was this weekend, spending 1,600 miles on my motorcycle, enjoying the scenery but fascinated by Wall Street news at the same time. Thankfully my iPhone is adept at delivering the latest stories to me wherever I am, even if that place is watching a sunset from the top of a mountain in Alabama.

On one hand I can’t help but feel desperately sorry of the tens of thousands of employees that will be punished for the failure of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch. With Lehman falling into bankruptcy and Merrill being consumed by Bank of America, significant changes are going to happen to the respective employees of each company.

These changes will impact the city of New York, Manhattan and of course the families of soon to be displaced workers. The question on the minds of many will be where to replace a high paying Wall Street job in the face of a giant sucking sound from other financial companies facing uncertain times themselves.

What is oh so ironic is that these companies and others facing dismembering peril are full of people like you and I. But as a collective they tend to make decisions that are better for the company than for their customers. Now that many will be soon unemployed or underemployed they will get a first hand lesson of what it is like to live in financial fear and be ignored by their creditors.

These higher flyers of Wall Street will find that even though they will make a logical presentation to their creditors on how to best deal with their unforeseen troubles, their creditors will ignore the commonsense approach and instead go straight to the emailed corporate policy of ‘Show Me The Money’.

The tragedy is that those of higher incomes have further to fall at times like these. They are not as experienced in dealing with creditors nor do they have the experience necessary to effectively deal with the creditors, like a low income budget juggling family does. Instead many with cash in their bank accounts today will make the same silly mistakes as many others have of spending down whatever cash they have to stall difficult decisions.

While New York may have been a long time home for many on Wall Street, they may now find greater emotional comfort and more control over their lives by moving to Main Street instead.

It’s okay to evaluate your life, decide you don’t like where you are and where you are headed, and start over.

Success isn’t the American dream, starting over is the true American Dream. Success comes and goes but it is the ability to rise and take steps towards a new future in a tough time that is the stuff that we need to be made of.

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Steve

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