Making Friends with Your Finances
(Page 5 of 5)
July / August 2003
By Jon Spayde, Utne magazine
RELATED CONTENT
From Watts to the Amazon, these biological pioneers explore new frontiers of hope.......
Will large-scale cycle manufacturing make an all-American comeback?...
Here is a 10-step primer from a media expert on how to help get you or your cause noticed, on your ...
Making It January 6, 2003 Issue By David Brooks, The Weekly Standard Today’s college students are ...
Turn on the radio, see a movie, read a best-selling novel, walk into a card shop, and you'll be con...
I have to be careful not to end up in financial fairyland, of course. Money issues—the hard need to save, invest, and manage my resources—push me out of my private safety zone and into a reeling world of contradiction, choices, and concerns. I accept the necessity of sacrificing time and effort for the sake of my future and the well-being of those I love. But I cannot hide from the fact that money issues place me in the thick of an economic system that is both miraculously productive and deeply unfair, and that I must find my place within it and a platform from which to take it to task. Ironically, as much as I have protested in the past that money doesn’t really matter, I realize now that it helps me find out what sort of human being I am—what I am willing to do to obtain material security and what I am not willing to do.
And so, steering clear of both the golden vision of perfect security and the reflexive retreat from what scares me, I propose to pay attention to money not just as a practical necessity (which it is) but also as an inquiry into what I value. I hope to scorn nothing that helps me better understand what money means to me (from self-help books to stockbrokers), and at the same time to avoid all prepackaged answers, whether from self-help books or stockbrokers. I hope to live in the security and safety—and the danger and excitement—of the search as I go.
Because nothing has more power than money to show me where I am powerless; where I need to seek help and find faith, where my efforts end and something more powerful simply has to take over, I intend to embrace money as one of those unsettling teachers that the Buddhists like to talk about—a former enemy, now an uneasy friend, who knows my weaknesses and will slap me down smartly if I show it too little respect.
And so instead of just “managing” money, I’d like to live with it in a bracing relationship, a sort of marriage, that will keep me on my toes, questing and learning, as long as I live.
Jon Spayde is a senior editor of Utne.
Contact Debtors Anonymous at www.debtorsanonymous.org or 781/453-2743
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 | 5 |