There are only two things wrong with money: too much or too little.
―
This is St Mary’s Church, Totnes.
Imagine how much it cost to build.
Think of the wealth, think of the toil, think of the sacrifice.
In a way, albeit that religion no longer plays such an invasive part in our lives, it’s no different from the way we now see money; namely, a way to make and be something.
Of course, like so very often, I generalise to make my point but the reason I’ve turned to money — and I might be here for a while yet — is partly as a result of picking up for the nth time Stephen Jenkinson’s book, Money and the Soul’s Desire (I’ve got an audio version saved on Google Drive which makes the experience slightly hit and miss) but mostly as a way to express my own disappointment with the fact that I’ve never got to the bottom of why money has reigned in and ordered my work-obsessed days, much to the chagrin of my better, more creative self.
That’s a long-winded of saying that I’ve never investigated the meaning of money.
But, before I get to that, let me ask you a question:
If I say money, what does it mean to you?
I’ll be honest, I find this a tough one to answer, mainly as a result of the fact that we look upon money as the product or fruit of having it or not having it.
We never, or rarely perhaps, look at what money actually is.
Pausing there for a moment.
I wonder what we did when we didn’t produce a surplus? Yes, I’m talking about our hunter-gatherer forebears. Did they have a need for an exchange mechanism? I don’t know, not having researched the point but something tells me that exchange for value only came into its own when we were able to produce more than we needed to live.
Back to the money point.
I don’t think of money as a physical thing, even in these days where less and less people carry cash.
And the hold it has over us.
In fact for some people, it is their life.
Take it away.
Most people think they’ll die or live inexorably in an anxious, suicide-inducing state.
What I’m circling around though isn’t a description of money but more the internal sense and feeling that it induces. Why is that?
I know why I want to pick up and examine this area of my life. Simply this. I wonder if I hadn’t taken money to mean the purpose of work, what then?
Would I, rather than saying I needed a certain amount to survive, have thrown even greater caution to the wind and pursued a full-blown creative life? In my case, that oscillated between art, calligraphy, poetry and speaking?
I’m not sure, but over the coming weeks I’m going to hold up my ill-conceived relationship with money to see what it reveals. I’m going to sit in the mystery where that needs doing and I’m going to open up about my tendency, bordering on fervour, not to give a fig about having any, less still accreting it as some prized possession.
Have a wonderful Monday.