In Which I Ramble and Make Little Sense…
…because I am trying to figure out why I am upset.
You know how the Beatles sang,
“I don’t care too much for money
Money can’t buy me love.” ?
They were so on to something…
It’s kind of freeing to know that you can really run on empty even with sufficient money and material worth. Or a large amount of money and material worth. It’s freeing because it helps us to see the illusion of the rat race- where we endlessly chase after success in work and wealth for fulfillment- and find space to search for and meditate on what we really value and care about.
Perhaps I’m demonstrate my own enormous privilege in being able to say, “money doesn’t matter”: although I may not be a rich American, I’ve always been provided for somehow.
But lately, in some ways I resent the focus put on money. I resent how it captivates people and keeps them from appreciating what they have, robs them of contentment. I hate how people identify themselves with their ‘having’ and ‘wanting’. I hate how it sets life on two planes: x-axis is time and y-axis is money; the coordinate points measuring your current self-worth. I hate how it robs time with family and siphons our value of those relationships because we spend so much of ourselves and our life accumulating it (“investing” is the word we use when we want to sound like we are doing something very responsible; “hoarding” is the word we use when we aren’t talking about ourselves, but “other people”).
Ok- so money itself is not bad, but the love of money, an unfettered emotional relationship to our material stuff, or the intense focus on getting and having and wanting. The regret of- and mourning over- not having had or received. The anxiety over future getting and having. It’s an obsessive cycle that-when we are unconscious of it and passive to its directives- takes us out of our body and the present moment and runs us into the ground with its delusions. Because something I’ve learned is that if you decide to tether yourself and your faith to your past anxieties over money and allow yourself to believe your job is to ‘fix’ yourself and how you felt by accumulating, you will suffer. You will miss out on the goodness of the invaluable things in life (love, people, spirit) in favor of the self-defeating obsession.
The obsession isn’t always loud; sometimes it’s kind of unconscious. Its chief characteristic is that it’s a sneaky and voracious micro-manager for our thoughts and actions. Whether it rings like a shot-gun (Lifetime channel-style extreme shopping addiction) or it seeps in like background noise (buying more than we can afford, running over our finances in our mind in a never-ending loop, anxieties over future money).
*Sigh* rambly, me. What was my point, really?
My point is: I’m sick of it: whatever we call covering our eyes and ears and- by our actions- tacitly deciding external ‘stuff’ is more precious than people and spiritual matters. Or not realizing that we’ve decided that our people relationships are better mediated and supported through ‘stuff’ than spirit. That’s really how I feel today. That a lot of our pat desires in life (like the desire for money- but also its many iterations, analogs, or stand-ins: a sense of comfort, the promise of security, and the resulting illusion of peace and freedom) can be heightened distractions in this life. That our time here is short and I don’t want to waste it forgetting that people and real, breathing life matters more than looking good and accumulating stuff and being self-obsessed. Real peace and freedom comes with letting go, with being non-possessive, and with deciding that your own story isn’t the only one that matters. That your life is part of a greater narrative and that more worlds and life and truth exist beyond the material world and the things of the (even literal) flesh.
That even though “you” is an easy pronoun to write, I don’t mean to point the finger at anyone else more than myself.
“You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body. “- C.S. Lewis
