TAW Thoughts 17 : Week 6 - Money, Money, Money

In some kind of inspirational rush, brought on by some wonderful winter’s sunlight yesterday - I finished reading not only Week 5, but Week 6’s chapter of The Artist’s Way.

It’s all about the filthy cash this week. And our attitudes about it. I used the term  filthy cash  with a huge sense of the complexities within myself now. Perhaps it’s an age thing, or indicative of my change in life recently. Although I hold some worries still over not having enough money, I’m also relatively at ease that we have “enough” and also that we could well do with asking for some more.

Is money really that evil? That’s how I perhaps was or was not brought up. I lived with a widowed mother, who lived off a superannuation pension because of her age. Money was tighter than tight, yet as a child and teenager I don’t think I suffered particularly from lack of it. There are a couple of potential life-courses I might have taken, if I’d been living in one of the surrounding and very rich farming families I shared my class and school with. I might have gone and taken French as a foreign language - and gone off for a trip to France from it. Or I might have gone off to varsity like all my classmates did, seeking some career or other. Instead, I went to work at the local post office, and that first job decision moved me along the track to a very lucrative career in I.T. I could have deviated elsewhere within that path, on many occasions. But here is where I am - after a relatively poor childhood background. I never learnt that money was evil. I did learn that more of it can ease your worries, however - but to get it you must work hard, and make some often awkward life decisions.

But I also learnt of compassion through money. I always shared it, after saving enough to look after myself and family. My friends profited from my genioristy, as did many charities through the years. Money was a means to an end - but it was up to me to decide whether something had ended, or whether I would move onto something else, or continue the same path my work and life had opened up for me. Money made some of those options much less worrisome however.  

So, I would have been a very different person by now, with a very different outlook and skills, if money had been more readily available in my childhood.. In fact there’s a good chance I wouldn’t be a scrapbooker or on this blog. But you can’t look back like that, and place big what-ifs onto something as simple as money.

More money would make life much easier, and my life much happier. I wouldn’t feel the pressure I still do, to somehow provide a little more rainy-day income into this household. I wouldn’t be so worried that all our electrical appliances are of a similar age now, and all due to break down and need replacing.

A few months ago, as a fultime worker at the peak of her career, I had stacks of it. Hard-earned, of course, but mine to do with it what I wanted. But it couldn’t bring me another child, yet it made our life much easier in many places. Peaks and troughs, ups and downs. I have them now, still, as someone who earns nothing, and has considerably less money to play around. I still have those peaks and troughs and ups and downs. So it’s not about money - is it? It’s more about attitude.  

People say money can’t make you happy. There are many examples of exceedingly rich but depressed people, to prove all those people correct. The Sunday Newspaper’s Fabulous magazine of yesterday even featured one of those little articles dictating this attitude. It profiled one woman who earns £100,000, has the latest designer gear, shoes and handbags - and says she’s unhappy with it. She says no one gets to know her as a person. If she meets a man who’s interested, he will quickly go on to another woman even richer. So she says, in the magazine’s attempt to prove that lots of money makes you unhappy.

But tell that to Bill Gates, Richard Branson, The Queen, Noel Edmonds, Chris Moyles, or to me. I had lots of money, earned a lot of it through equally hard work. It did make me happy to be able to have a nice house, and to not worry over appliances breaking down, and being able to invest in my daughter’s educational future. I no longer can do that, but I would suggest that my lack of money now is not the force behind happiness or otherwise. That’s not to do with too much, or too little money - but towards our own mindsets.  

The woman concerned works hard for her money - long hours. Britain expects it’s workers to work many more hours, with less holiday days than many countries in the rest of Europe. Much of those hours are unclaimed for either, not paid for with overtime - so the amount of hours employers are getting for free is unknown, not documented. Attempts to suggest British workers should be able to seek a more equal home-family life are good in principle - but difficult to facilitate in employment. To do well means putting in the additional time. Additional time means that promotion to more money, or keeping your head above the copious competition for that opportunity. If you don’t do it, someone (many) people in the office will do. However, there are areas in society where you can evidence the result of this implied work-ethic - children and young youths are now coming out to suggest they don’t see their parents that often anymore. Statistics in the same newspaper yesterday suggested that the average teenager in this country only see their fathers for one and a half hours per day each week - and that’s averaged over the weekends also. The media is also currently concentrating on imploring the government to do something about the yob culture prevalent in many of our towns and cities, where young adults are terrorising the streets. Many are pointing this back to lack of parenting, but take that back a bit further - where exactly are the parents themselves?

Yes, money can be said to be the root (route?) of some evil - but it’s an object, not a sentient being. Surely the onus must, as with some of the yob problems society is currently suffering from, go back onto human beings, and their pursuit or expectations of money in the first place.  

I worked hard for my own money until recently - very hard - long commutes, work taken home, an emotional payment from myself as well as time. Now I have none. I’m not even going to do the exercise of counting what I spend it on this week, like The Artist’s Way tells me to do - because there is a good chance I won’t spend one penny of it this week. Not on petrol, not on a cup of coffee - you might be tempted to point out that I perhaps then should count up the costs of my presence here in this house - how much did we spend on groceries this last weekend? and how much does our power, heating, lighting, and perhaps this internet access cost me, then?

Those are costs that we are mindful of, of course. We drive for the best bargain in everything - our house is not set at the highest  heating temperature - and in this foggy day I am beginning to feel a little chilly - but simply putting on another sweater will help that.

I’m not going anywhere this week, either - other than where my feet will take me. And I won’t drive down to the local town to buy myself a starbucks coffee or magazine. This - the spend nothing week - is a typical week for me. I spend nothing. For a good three weeks out of four, my budget is roughly - zero.

If you’d have caught me last week, it would have been a different matter. It was school half-term holidays, and also Valentines. I spent a fortune of our joint family money on books, a starbuck lunch with my daughter, and purchased a reasonably expensive (but not top of the range) Yamaha keyboard for my daughter to learn the piano on. The keyboard is a gift to myself also - I feel the call to pick up my own playing from childhood again. All of the purchases were specifically on other people - and perhaps a little reckless - but I favoured myself also, in the supermarket shop - by buying magazines to read. Even then, each magazine was bought for a reason - as my writing assignments require me to research the relevant magazine markets. I haven’t bought clothes for myself since entering this stay at home life, and realising I had no jeans or tops to wear. And I don’t actually miss having so much money to spend on myself anymore, even the huge purchases at digital stores have gone - and are not missed particularly.

On Saturday night we watched a Will Smith movie on Sky Premiere TV - called In Pursuit of Happyness. It tells the tale, set in 1981, of Chris Gardner. Chris at the time was suffering from some extremely bad fortune, and was about to lose his wife, then his apartment, and any chance of making any money from selling some medical equipment no-one wanted yet he’d sunk his entire life savings into. He fought to keep his son and himself together, and found an internship with a stockbroker firm. The internship, for six months, was unpaid, and did not guarantee a job at the end of it. He was competing with 19 other keen stockbrokers for that job. Meanwhile, Chris and his son lost their apartment, and ended up in local shelters, or sleeping on trains whilst he went through the ever-challenging expectations of that internship.

Through the movie, and after having read all the cosmic ordering and even TAW book, I got the feeling that I wouldn’t be happy with the ending. It was obvious where this movie was going - no one is going to make a movie like this, where everything goes wrong through stupid decisions, and pure hard luck - without giving it a happy ending. And indeed, the movie does end happily, with Chris being accepted into that job. Text at the end informs us that Chris went onto much prosperity, and sold his own company partially off for several million later on.

The moral of this movie - that pure hard work will pay off, and you will have a happy ending if you work hard for it. Also - that good people do win out in the end.

Now, Chris made many decisions during the course of this movie - decisions which led to his wife leaving him, to his medical equipment being stolen on two occasions, to taking an unpaid internship which put the safety of his son in jeopardy as he lost the ability to pay for an apartment. He also made some good decisions, given the ending - but at the time, I found many of them debatable.

Should I feel that the universe supplied him with the right things to finally find himself that abundance - the job and later the richness? Perhaps. But was this just because he was so poor beforehand? Was this just the fact that we always want to see someone who is nice do well for themselves, despite challenges in life? Don’t we want to know that even if we make decisions to put us down on luck, that the universe or God will still provide - if we work our butts off for it.

Because we’re nice enough to deserve it?

Although the message from In Pursuit of Happyness was nice - and gives hope to all the rest of us, I have some doubts. This was Hollywood after all. It was concentrating on delivering a message like that - everyone needs to hear that good things happen to good people. It sells. It’s nice. It made me cry when Chris Gardner finally got told he had the job.

But I took a look around at that stockbrokers. There were 19 other young men and women fighting for that one job at the end of their internship. They had swotted as equally hard as Chris, rung as many on the cold-call sheets thrown at them, worked for as much money as he had - nothing. Chris ended up having sold more services to his call list than those others (perhaps - the movie never said) and I remain unsure if he’d scored the highest in their written exam. I’m not questioning whether he deserved the job at all - he had fought and sacrificed his last money in his wallet for it. He had done everything asked of him, and he was a good communicator. He certainly deserved it. But Chris had been treated like a teacher’s pet through the whole six months - asked to get manager’s coffees, move their cars, be a general dogsbody. They already had something in mind for him against those other interns, who didn’t get so noticed.

But my husband did the usual and expected thing, when I attempted to surmise my feelings on the message, and of the other 19 interns.  He said - Chris was poor so he deserved that job above all the other interns, who were probably already rich kids anyway.

Really? How do we know that? Wasn’t it possible that some of those other interns were also suffering financially for taking on that unpaid internship? Some of them could have even been as hard-working as Chris himself, and of a similar background. We didn’t know that. We couldn’t know that - the movie was centred on a hero - someone who did good, someone who fought and won against some challenging odds.

We want to know nice people can do well, if they work hard, and the universe will supply them with an abundance of money, right? And if someone does prove this to us, then we write off the others around them as being undeserving. Now, those other 19 interns all came into the office, worked longer hours than Chris - he had to leave at five because of his son - and you can’t tell me that they are undeserving also. Perhaps for some of them, in 1981, the universe did supply some other options to them, and their own lives went onto something different, but also lucrative.  

I hope so. Because I don’t want to know that success is qualified in money. Because we wouldn’t have known about Chris’s story at all, if he’d simply just gotten that job. Getting the job should have been good enough - it would have allowed him a salary and to take his son out of the shelters and into safety. And we would still have been crying by the end of the story, as he found happiness. But the producers decided to then tell us that Chris went on to create his own company, and then to becoming very rich from that. A rags to riches story. We wouldn’t have known about Chris Gardner and his start in life in 1981 if he hadn’t gone onto create wealth. Getting a job for a poor person struggling should be celebration enough, but it isn’t. Thankfully, the story of pursuing happiness - found finally in all those sacrifices begetting a sharebroking job - is not lost with the monetary conclusion. We can believe that Chris Gardner did find happiness (and relief!) on obtaining that job, and that his further prosperity was also deserved.

Back to me, then. I have read copious books over the last week. The Artist’s Way tells me not to feel guilty about asking for more money - yet many others tell me not to be so greedy. Only one person can win the lottery ticket this week - only one wish for £1M  can be granted. Better to believe in the universe supplying “enough” just when it’s needed (as per Chris Gardner’s story, really) than to ask for much more money from an abundant universe.

It’s all quite perplexing, really. Who is right, then? The Artist’s Way, or the other books? General public perception (ala lots of money doesn’t make you happy) or pure faith that I’m not being greedy when I ask for more?

Only a couple of months ago you would have found me cursing money. It nearly meant the death of this marriage. With me not working, and no budget for anything, any possible breakdown was a huge worry. It drove both of us to dispair. We have been more lucky recently - my husband’s bonus payment has come through, and now I have found a minor (the most poorly paid job possible) job for a few hours per week. But of course - at the same time the washing machine has broken down, and the bonus payment came too late to allow us to find an overseas holiday for the summer. So, we’re going internally this year, and we’ll make the most of our time away anyway. I still worry about what might happen if one of us is injured, or my husband loses his job. He has more options regarding employment opening up - they arrived at the time I was requesting things from the universe also. It all seems somehow in a pattern which I doubt I’ll ever be able to draw. Inter-related, intertwined, but not visible for my own small pair of eyes. But I do have faith that things will be exactly right as we need it. To keep this faith, however - I need to do something that many people might question. I need to break the rule of asking for enough, and raising it to a degree.  Because I do believe that the universe is very abundant and that we deserve a bit more prosperity and opportunities to share in it.

I  want to be able to ask for enough money and raise the level of what I mean by “enough”. Previously this meant - enough to survive on, enough to repair the washing machine with. But if the universe is abundant in supplying options and jobs to secure more money, then I would like to ask for more than enough - to allow for that big house with a big yard in it, a yard to hold a couple of dogs, and a few children, and perhaps a conservatory to write in. And more than enough to take away the worries of everyday life, where one appliance breakdown, or missed bonus payment, or one injury might bring down a so-far happy household.

I want to know that all the good hard-working guys get more than enough, and deservedly so also. And that they are prosperous in their own successes - even if they fail at some things, and don’t produce a story of hollywood dimensions.  

Despite all these brain-numbing thoughts around money, the Week 6 chapter of The Artist’s Way is possibly - for me, anyway - the most least thought-provoking chapters of the book so far. Money is money. End of. There is far more to worry about like the fact that I’m spending far too much time on the internet today, rather than doing something more productive. And at least the exercises were a little more simple than other chapters. All those in-depth and repetitive task and exercise questions concerning my biggest lacks and biggest wishes are starting to grate against me.

I am getting to a point in doing the Artist’s Way, in refuting some of the contents. Whether that’s helpful or not, well - I guess it might show some level of acceptance that the world is not always just as Julia Cameron says it might be, and that I have built enough confidence in myself to go off elsewhere from where one particular counsel might lead me. It may be an interesting time of the next half of this journey then.  

And that - is well and truly enough about money.