I’m sitting in Delta’s airport lounge in Seattle waiting for my delayed flight. As Crown Rooms go, this is one of Delta’s finest. It is located on the second floor with one wall of glass looking toward Mount Rainier (assuming it’s not cloudy, which it usually is when I’m here) and the other overlooking the concourse at the commoners below. LaPriel thinks I’m a snob when I use such terms. She especially hates it when I tell her about not getting upgraded to first class and having to sit with the peasants in coach.
I’m not really a snob. A snob turns his nose up at any experience he considers below his station in life. I don’t have a station in life so I relish a variety of experiences, allowing myself the joy of comparing the pleasant with the not so pleasant. I have spent hundreds of hours in coach. In fact, earlier this week I had the thrill of sitting in the exact same seat⎯14D⎯on the exact same plane I wrote about here. I recognized it on my flight to San Antonio by the petrified dust patterns around my chair. It’s scary when you recognize an aircraft by its dirt.
When I refer to commoners and peasants, I do so in jest, because at heart I am a commoner.
I’ve been thinking about money lately, prompted by a
blogging friend's musings on the topic. I grew up what I suppose would be considered poor by U.S. standards if measured by income. Although I don’t ever remember feeling poor. My life seemed normal. We were blessed with a house and enough food. My single mom was resourceful. She raised five kids at a variety of jobs from selling Tupperware to making dolls.
When I was fourteen, I decided I was going to be rich. I dreamt about it and overdosed on self-help books from The Greatest Salesman in the World to the Richest Man in Babylon. I set goals, read affirmations in the mirror, and fell asleep listening to positive thinking tapes. I tried a number of businesses from graphoanalysis to window cleaning. By the time I was eighteen, I was burnt out on money. I gave up the get rich schemes and spent the year after high school washing dishes at a downtown hotel, working with men and women who had to live and support kids on the meager wages we earned cleaning the plates of the rich folks who ate at the fancy hotel restaurant.
I then moved to Mexico and saw what poverty really is. I also got my first lessons on the proper attitude toward money. In the Yucatan, families would invite me into their tar paper shacks with roofs so low I couldn’t stand up straight inside. These families would offer me a stone to sit on because there were no chairs. Then they would feed me some of their dinner, usually a thin soup with corn tortillas or perhaps some beans with eggs.
In Mexico, I learned no matter how poor you are, you share. I also began to get the first inkling that money is like a river. It flows. Sometimes fast, sometimes at a trickle, but it is never really ours.
It’s ironic that after getting so burnt out on money in my youth I manage it professionally. I spend my days making decisions on what to do with billions of dollars. It seems so abstract. The dollars are just figures on a page. It’s like a game. I know if I do a good job my clients will be able to grant more scholarships, protect more of the environment and help more of the needy, but I never see the money.
I rarely see my own money either. In an age of direct deposit, online banking and credit cards, I can go for weeks and never have a dollar bill in my pocket. My money also seems abstract. Just figures on a screen.
I realize I am blessed. Money is abstract to me because there is enough. Money is very real when the balance is close to zero. I also know what that feels like.
I believe the abstraction is good. It helps me to remember that my money is not really mine. Money is like a river. It shouldn't be dammed up, but shared, allowed to flow to those in need.
