Be
Careful Where You Go Digging Around
Naturally, in January I started out full of
optimism that I would finally learn "money." I love how I used "brilliance"
in that title, so sure I was of myself! I do feel some pride when I tell you
that I am still at it writing down all of our monthly expenditures and
categorizing them to find out where the money is going. But mostly I feel like
a rabbit going down the rabbit hole: Money, I am finding out more and more now,
is brimmed to overflowing with hidden meanings and insanity. Weird little habits
and behaviours are reluctantly starting to reveal themselves on my homemade
ledger pages. I feel as if I am now, a few months in, uncovering secrets inside
both myself and my husband – secrets that have power and they live somehow in
the money. Oh my goodness that sounds certifiable! Let me try to explain.
This whole thing started when I finally
couldn't look the other way any longer. I could clearly see that our spending
was out of control. At Christmas we both spent money purely as our emotions at
the time dictated and those "decisions" revealed much more than I was
at first prepared to admit. Today this article is happening because a small
light bulb went off again: gardening season is starting and while I am an avid
and fairly good gardener (I make part of my living working seasonally at a
large greenhouse), I feel the same emotions I feel every spring. There is a
reticence in my bones against pruning that first branch or digging that first
planting hole. I don't want to get in there and get my hands dirty (and, I
think, I don't want to make the decisions . . . in money, I feel the same
thing: a powerful reluctance to get in there and make the decisions – say no,
say yes, start, finish, throw away, end and begin. Yet at least with
gardening, once I get in there I feel so good. I am once again together with my
muse and I always find that place where I lose time and get lost in my work, a
most awesome state of being, of feeling really alive in this world. I find that
in physics too.
But back to money as it is here where fishy
things are going on and little eccentricities are showing up left right and
center. Writing everything down as we spent, or more importantly knowing THAT we
were going to have to write it down, I expected to finally get a grip on this
slippery eel called money. Now I am less certain. I have three months of
spending history to use as reference, and I can't help but notice that while I
have become quite comfortable with balancing quality versus price, and going
after nutrition versus convenience at the grocery store, we have what seems to
be an entirely unhealthy and unwholesome addiction to A&W breakfast coupons,
for example. For two "health nuts" who are into cross-fit and cleansing
smoothies, bacon n' eggers and sausage n' eggers seem to be one of our dirty
little secrets – three times a week, sometimes more. I say I go there because
the coffee is good and in these topsy-turvy times, it comes with free refills,
something every penny pincher would agree is simply good acumen. But it isn't.
It's because the same old-timers are in there every morning and they say hi and
the ladies know us now and the place is homely and blue-collar and we feel it
like a warm cultural blanket from our modest childhoods. We go there to feed
our souls.
I am finding out that there are many
examples of this inexplicable, at least to a rational mind, behaviour in the
ledgers. Money, I am discovering, is madness, and there is a deep treasure
trove or black stinky pit (take your pick, or both) inside money. We are doing things
with it that seem to be feeding us in un-obvious ways, sometimes consciously
like the breakfasts, but I suspect, looking at them again, that most are
unconscious. Why a collection of air plants? Why this red T-shirt I
"needed"? There is a lot of ego-feeding here. Why this expanding list
of Spartan race "vacations"? Can you spell mid-life crisis? There are
fears in here . . .
Just as with gardening, I live it, breathe
it and dream it. And I have very little understanding of why I must buy certain
things. So much can be categorized as impulse spending, but now as I sit here
and mull, that too-broad category seems inadequate. I continue to write down
and record our expenditures but as I do, there is an increasing sense that I
must tread carefully when I try to interpret the findings. I must use a fine
brush and light touch . . . there are emotional hazards here. My husband and I
are two very reasonable rational people on the outside – both with long and
very ingrained scientific outlooks on life. We trust our understanding and what
we can see and touch and measure. But I look here and see the understory:
revealed here are eccentricities, oddities and general weirdness. Trying to
grasp what's going on inside our minds, hearts, souls, isn't going to be easy .
. .
On a science note, I am thinking of
exploring nuclear fusion as an energy source, to finish off the High Energy
Science series. I also want to do an article exploring how we could adapt the
process of photosynthesis into an exploitable green energy source. Finally, I
think the amplitudehedron – the multidimensional theory of the particle – would
be very interesting to explore further. Once the gardening and greenhouse work
is under control (small dry laugh).
