You wouldn’t expect people to be buying houses at a time like this and yet they are.

You wouldn’t expect the stock market to be hanging in there at a time like this and yet it is.

You wouldn’t expect people to be flying to New York at a time like this and yet they have been.

Somehow, someway, we are moving on half an ear listening to CNN and ever-vigilant when opening our mail, but moving on nonetheless. The question is, to where?

Don’t expect Alan Greenspan to be much help on this one. In recent testimony before Congress, the Federal Reserve chairman seemed like he really wanted to assure us nervous Nellies that the long-term picture was sound. But that won’t help the South Gate factory owner trying to prepare next year’s budget. “The outlook,” Greenspan ventured, “is clearly biased towards economic weakness.”

No kidding. At least the esteemed Warren Buffett calls his expectation of “a relatively deep and extended recession” more of a guess than a forecast. No one knows.

As Buffett reminds us, recessions are a necessary part of business life. But because they are so idiosyncratic, starting and stopping based on their own unique set of events, recession forecasts are not worth the computer screens they’re written on. In 1991, a combination of lower interest rates and the end of the Gulf War and thus the stabilization of oil prices appears to have done the trick.

This time, conventional wisdom shows an upturn breaking out around late spring or early summer. Okay, that sounds hopeful. And judging by the duration of post-World War II recessions anywhere from half a year to a little over a year reasonable. Perhaps the more relevant question, however, is how it will end.

The most upbeat scenario is military-inspired: that U.S. forces sniff out all the top thugs from Al Qaeda, which leads to more arrests of other thugs planning further terrorist attacks. A lone nutcase is charged in the anthrax attacks and there are no more reports of contamination. All of which leads to a 1,000-point jump in the Dow and a record-setting holiday season.

Here’s a more likely outcome: A few opportunistic businesses take the plunge early next year and start spending money again goaded by low interest rates, depleted inventories, and declining productivity that requires them to invest in new plants and equipment. That should lead to more borrowing, more hiring and, ultimately, more profits, as other companies loosen up their purse strings.

This is normally the way that recessions end. But what worries folks is a third scenario: that there are more terrorist attacks either in the United States or overseas, that the military makes little progress in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden remains on the loose, that the anthrax attacks will stop but the attacker won’t be apprehended, and that travel will pick up but not to pre-Sept. 11 levels.

In other words, uncertainty. Not panic or fear, but a sense of unease. Downbeat. Tentative. Defensive. Wall Street hates those words because they suggest a world unwilling to take chances. And taking chances is the way businesses get started and folks make money.

So here we are in a kind of economic Twilight Zone spending money, per usual, and maybe even investing in a new car or house. But somehow, it’s just not the same as before. Beyond spending, beyond worrying, what we’re mostly doing is just waiting.

For what we’re not sure. And that’s not great.

Mark Lacter is editor of the Business Journal.