In our time money is an enormous issue. It was discussed more in the presidential campaign by far than any other issue by far. It is the biggest story in every media, from stock market tickers flashed across supermarket and airport TV screens to an avalanche of warnings that we need money to pay our bills, keep up credit ratings, have health care, retire with safety and security, afford the new technologies that we must have to pay our bills, keep up credit ratings, have health care, retire with safety and good health and be secure. News of money now assaults us all day and night on our computers, our tablets and smart phones. People live in terror about money, worried about not making enough, ashamed of struggling.
In my life, I have been through all of those things, still do sometimes, but I have come to understand that money and spirituality are very closely linked. One affects the other, for better or worse, and to my surprise. I suspect people have more panic attacks about money than any other thing in the normal course of their lives. That’s good for corporations and credit card companies, bad for people.
Economic stats are addictive, and fuel obsession and tension. They are our daily Super Bowl and World Series, the successor to Mass. Technology has made money fear about money much worse. If we miss a payment, everyone on earth will know about it in a micro-second. We can check our declining bank accounts every minute and watch our imminent ruin and mortification live on many devices and in good graphic color. Money has become so central in our world, and we are being asked to make more of it all he time to keep up with the things we absolutely have to have to survive, from medical tests to cell phone plans.
Even deadbeats used to have some space and privacy, some respite from money.
We are sheep sometimes, led down this path all day long, from every conceivable source, huddled together, cowering and frantic for more. Our medicine is tied to money, the roof over our head, our peace of mind, our political and legal and media systems. We are an aspiritual culture. There is little to balance the worship of money. Our politicians fight all day and take money openly and without any kind of shame. People do not wring their hands in terror over work they hate, leaders who abandon them, the meaningless lives they sometimes lead and the absence of any kind of spiritual dimension. Those things are nothing as compared to the skipping of a credit card payment.
I have learned that I cannot hide from money, live without it, or run away from it. Believe me, I tried. I need to be disciplined and mature about it. I need to understand it accept it. I do not hide from the mailbox anymore. Or run from the bookkeeper. Or push the “no receipt”button when I take some cash out of my checking account. I need to know how much I have. I don’t do auto pays, I want to decide to right each check. I am not a slave to money and will not be, but I have dropped a lot of my false attitudes about it. Ads are okay, so are contributions. I am publishing three e-books this year. I don’t give my work away, as I used to do. But mostly, what I have learned is that I must not be afraid of it. I have to live in peace with it.
Curiously, it is my spiritual work that is helping me understand money, not any economic savvy. Quieting my mind and anxiety. Meditating on it. Changing the parts of my life that need to evolve. Focus. Changing the way I think about it, that it is an enemy a dread thing, a horrid necessity. It is better than that, so am I. I am learning to provide clarity on on what I want, how I think, what I see. I have learned in my life that people with a lot of money are just as anxious about it as people without money, perhaps more so, because they have even more to worry about. We’ve all heard the stories of the average Joe who wins the lottery and blows his brains out a year later. Sadly, some of those stories are true. Because Joe discovers that $100 million doesn’t in itself make him any less miserable than he was a year before. And what a letdown that must be.
I believe in forging a healthy relationship with money, I am learning to do that. There is something to this idea about the energy we put out. I believe in balancing my life with a spiritual element because it will help me with money and everything else. And it brings much more peace and contentment than any amount of money. When it comes to money, fear is a wasteful response. It doesn’t pay any bills. Fear is a nasty habit fed by a greedy society that makes having little money a shameful heresy, worse than robbing a bank. Pain at least warns us when we are too close to the fire. Fear does nothing, it is a roving little devil, picking up the rampaging ethos of our corporate culture and channeling it right back into our conscious selves.
No one should be afraid of their e-mail or mailbox or come to believe that money defines us. That was a good starting point for me. Money is important, it is the means by which we learn to live in the world. But it is one thing, it is not everything. It does not make us good if we have it or evil if we don’t. It is not the same as having love, having friends. Spirituality always collides with practicality. None of us are free from the demands of the material world. I am learning to understand money. To be disciplined and mature about it.
I found that when fear of money becomes more important than living a life of meaning and peace, then the problem isn’t money. The problem was me. To fix one, I had to fix the other.