Money, Money, Money
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At age 10 or 11 I was just beginning to understand more about how the world works, about morals and ethics and my own agency. I was waking up to my ability to make choices about all kinds of things.
One particular memory of that time is from a summer day when my family had gone to see my grandmother. I loved visiting her, playing card games around her old wooden table, looking out at the street from under her bright orange awning. I loved the smell of her place, and no matter what the actual temperature it always felt warm in there.
We’d spent the afternoon with her that day and were getting ready to head home. I told my grandmother I needed to use the restroom before we left and she told all us kids she had something special that she would give to us when I came back. She would often give us a 10 or 20 guilder note (5 or 10 dollars) as a gift, which was a huge amount to me at the time.
I remember those minutes of anticipation as I was pondering what my grandmother wanted to give us. I felt sure, somewhere in me, not only that she would be giving us money but that it was going to be more than usual. Why I thought that, I don’t know, but I do remember then thinking that if she gave me 100 guilders—about $50—that that would be too much. To me, that was like an overwhelming treasure. I would be demure, I told myself, and not take it. No, no, that’s too much, I would say.
It was an early experience with setting good intentions that didn’t end up as intended.
When I stepped back out into the hallway with the rest of the family my grandmother pressed a 100 guilder note into my hand. There was no thought, no word from me beyond a thank you. I didn’t demure. I didn’t say No, no, that’s too much. Along with my brother and sister, I took the note, thanked her, and left with my family.
It wasn’t until recently that I even remembered that incident. I was in spiritual reflection class and we were talking about our relationship with money: where our thoughts and feelings about money come from, and how those feelings limit us or open us up. When I first remembered this long-ago event I was embarrassed—to have made that promise and then broken it so easily. Ugh, why did I do that and what did it say about me?
As I dug a little deeper, though, I had an image of myself as more hapless than intentional, on automatic pilot, with the momentum of the moment overriding my budding awareness that I have agency, that I am in charge of money, not the other way around. As I looked some more I realized I’d been absorbing thoughts and feelings and beliefs about money since before I could even begin to understand what it really was or what it meant. I was picking up all kinds of messages about this core reality that influences so many aspects of our lives before I really knew its significance.
Big things like: It’s really good to have it. You’re not supposed to talk about it. You’re not supposed to want too much of it.
And random things like: If someone takes you out to dinner, get something inexpensive on the menu. Don’t be miserly, but be sure to save plenty. Drive a hard bargain but be generous in all you do. Don’t go into debt if you can avoid it. Oh, but never ask for money—unless you’re asking your parents, but preferably not after the age of 25. And, did I mention, you’re not supposed to talk about money?
I’m still emerging from that foggy, tangled, unthinking, auto-pilot relationship with money.
Lewis Henry Lapham, in his book Money and Class in America, notes:
Money is like fire, an element as little troubled by moralizing as earth, air, and water. [We] can employ it as a tool, or…dance around it as if it were the incarnation of a god. Money votes socialist or monarchist, finds a profit in pornography or translations from the Bible, commissions Rembrandt and underwrites the technology of Auschwitz. It acquires its meaning from the uses to which it is put.
But while money itself is value-neutral, it does not, in practice, feel neutral for most of us. I think about what it can mean. Money can represent power; it can represent security. Those who have a lot of it can nevertheless feel poor. Those who don’t have much can feel wealthy. It triggers fear in us sometimes, elation at other times. It can trigger jealousy, guilt, anger, superiority, inferiority.
Surveys say that money disagreements are one of the top causes of arguments between spouses, and as much as we hear again and again that it is not the be-all-end-all, most of us are sympathetic to the words of comedian Spike Milligan: “All I ask is the chance to prove that money can’t make me happy.”
I wonder how many of us feel calm and relaxed in our relationship with money? How many of us are navigating money in a way that feels clear and right and purposeful? We might feel like there is too much of it leaving our hands. We might find that when the topic of money comes up, we feel bad because we have too little or too much, or something feels unfair, or because we’re afraid about a future we can’t see.
And that discomfort, I think, leads many of us to corral our interactions with it into short periods of time—maybe on Sunday afternoon once a month paying bills. It becomes kind of like taking out the trash. We do it, but we don’t like it, and we try to think about it as little as possible.
Which can limit our discomfort, but can also leave those emotional cross currents, money anxieties, conflicting attitudes and auto-pilot responses firmly in place, making us vulnerable to spending our money in ways that don’t really reflect who we are and want to be. But how we do or do not spend has an impact on us. And, aggregated across a community or a country, it has a big impact on all of us.
I think back to that early money memory I shared. I wonder whether on some level I realized that if I’d said No thank you to my grandmother, she might have been surprised, maybe even insulted. My brother and sister might have been left feeling guilty. Maybe I knew, on some level, that I would be entering emotional territory. And perhaps most of all I knew that I would have been stepping away from a familiar way of relating to something and it would feel different inside of me. It might change me.
But I think in order to get clarity about what we really want to do with the resources that are so important in our homes and in our lives, we may just have to walk into emotional territory. We might indeed feel different. And yes, it might change us.
Money is like fire. It can be harmful or it can be put to good use. I believe that when we put it to good use, it not only changes the “out there,” it changes the “in here”—because it strengthens our own relationship with our own values. So that we can look in the mirror and say, Yes, that feels good. That is what I want to create. That feels right. One money decision at a time.
- Money, Money, Money - May 1, 2017
