Freedom, Fear and Money

When I was a kid I was sure that my family was going to end up in the poorhouse. I imagined myself grubby and forlorn but feisty, dressed in threadbare shades of gray like in Oliver Twist (which is quite likely where I got the idea).

I told myself that as long as I reached the minimum working age of 14 before it happened, all would be well. I would be a heroine, going off to work at Taco Time to support a family of seven. Resplendent in orange-and-brown polyester, face glowing with pride over an order of Mexi-Fries.

Now that I’m no longer a kid, my approach to money is less fantastical but still partially founded in fear. I’ve always tried to live well within my means, with the objective of not having to even think about money. But I wonder if avoiding thinking about it is just another way of trying to manage fear.

The other thing I’ve always thought about money – when I did think about it, that is – is that what it can really help you buy is freedom.

That is, money becomes important when you have a job you hate and either can or can’t leave it because of money. And money can help you get an education, travel… basically, it can give you greater mobility and the power to define your own life rather than have it defined for you.

This week I’ve been reading a book called Your Money or Your Life. It looks at money as something that we choose to exchange our life energy for, since we spend so many of the hours of our lives working for money, spending it, working for it and then spending it again. The book invites you to step out of that pattern and decide how you really want to spend your life energy.

And that – the question of how I want to spend my life energy – is right up my alley.

So – you guessed it. This week a lot of the “things that scared me” had to do with money. I took a hard look at my bank account (where I discovered a $1000 overcharge in insurance premiums); I went on a “money fast” for two days, to see how much of my spending is habitual rather than serving real needs; I tried to bring consciousness to deciding whether to renew my gym membership; I stopped having a smoothie every day at an Internet café and found a great spot to get online at the library instead. I also found the desire to be intentional in the way I use my life energy seeping into other parts of my life, and canceled a couple of weekly appointments so there’s more time to focus on what I’m most drawn to doing right now.

Oh, and I decided to continue the experiment. I notice that there’s a real edge, for me, when it comes to stepping into fears around money. And I suspect that this, like the other fears I’ve been exploring for the past couple of months, may lead to more freedom. So I’m going to stay with this particular fear for the month of March and… see what happens.

Will it be fear, or freedom, or both? The next month will decide.

Peeling the Pomegranate

Have you ever really paid attention while coaxing the glowing red seeds of a pomegranate away from its white membrane with your fingers? I was doing that a minute ago. Each little cell was perfect as it came away in my fingers, each with its dark seed in the middle, its deep red flesh.

I was thinking – as I bit down into a mouthful of those pomegranate seeds and felt the walls of each little cell burst between my teeth, filling my mouth with its bright, sweet juice – about how yesterday I sat in a circle at an NVC retreat and looked around at 26 faces.

A week before, I’d been in that same circle and seen 26 people – some wrinkled, some not, some heavier, some thinner. Just an ordinary group of people. But yesterday I looked around that circle at one face after another, and each one was as beautiful and perfect and whole as a pomegranate seed.

As I looked at them, I thought of Persephone and her descent into Hades. During our week together I’d gotten to see each of these people go into dark places and – here’s the part I don’t get to see that often in the rest of my life – not just face those dark places, but share the journey with others. I got to see one person after another drop their masks and be completely real.

I’m still trying to work it out. In that circle yesterday when each of us had made that hero’s journey and emerged into the light (or at least emerged into the light for now), did the faces look so beautiful to me because of what I’d seen each person go through, and because I got to see their real-ness as they did so? Was it because, as one of my friends said, “Jasmine, you’ve fallen in love with these 26 people. That’s why they look so beautiful to you.”

Or was it that they had actually become more physically beautiful as their faces softened and their eyes widened through contact with their own real-ness?

I’m not sure. But what seems clear to me today is that the willingness of these 26 people to be real with others – to be connected with what makes each of us fully alive – really did make me fall in love with each of them.

This week I stepped into my fear by reading the first five pages of “My Ass (In the World)” to an audience. I think it may still become a one-woman show once I embrace my fear of acting, but that’s a project for another week! I specifically chose the person at the retreat that I thought of as the scariest, and asked him to work with me. I chose an old housemate from a list of people with whom I have unfinished emotional business, and sent her an email. I asked the retreat’s leader to work with me as a “demo,” and I sat in front of 26 people and unmasked my long-time struggle to be fully authentic in romantic relationships.

I also got inspired to face a life-long avoidance of anything that reeks of budgeting, and started to track which needs I’m trying to meet through my spending. Taking a real look at how and why I spend money promises to be deeply scary, for someone who as a kid told herself that her family was going to end up in the poorhouse and that the important thing was to reach age 14 so she could support seven people with a job at Taco Bell. (More on that next week).

One of the women at the retreat told me that each day she answers the following question in her journal: “What would I do, if the world was a friendly place?”

My question to myself today is:

What would I do, if being more real would only make me more beautiful, more connected to others, more alive? What would I do today, if I trusted that my being is like a pomegranate seed: perfect and whole just as it is?

Love and Fear

“I don’t have an act. But I’d love for you to applaud me anyway.”

It seemed like a joke at first, and for a second we just sat there. How could you sign up to do an act in a talent show and then ask for applause instead?

It didn’t take long, though, before all forty of us were clapping. And then somehow it built on itself, so that before we knew it we’d gotten up from the floor and were jumping up and down, stamping our feet, hooting, shouting his name.

At first we cheered for the audacity and fun of the idea. But a minute or so later, my throat scratchy with shouting, it seemed like there was a second wind, a second wave of energy through the crowd. And now we were clapping not for the idea, but to celebrate this man himself.

Suddenly we were clapping and shouting and whistling and stomping for his just BEING. Not because he’d done anything or been anything in particular, but just because he is.

Sort of like the way we touch a baby’s tiny translucent fingers and feel awe just because it is, no need for it to be anything else.

Only this was for an actual adult. Flaws and all.

I found myself wishing, as we clapped and shouted, that each one of us could stand at the center of a circle and be applauded. But then I realized that we were also cheering for ourselves – jumping and hooting and shouting for each other and for ourselves, just for being alive on this planet today.

This week the things that scared me most were about opening up to love’s possibilities.

On Monday night I stood shivering near an Arrivals sign, with cars speeding by to pick up passengers and that sort of zoomy, fast-moving feeling that an airport seems to spur. I was wearing a chauffeur’s cap and carrying a sign reading “Mr. _____.”

I’ve been dating the man whose name was on the sign for the past few months, in an often-euphoric but sometimes-turbulent courtship that counts among its challenges the fact that spans more than two continents.

So why was I wearing a hat and carrying a sign? I’d made a silly joke about sending my of-course-nonexistent chauffeur to pick him up. Also, several of the suggestions people have had for me lately, in terms of “things that could scare me,” have been of the street performance variety:

“How about if we do a little improv theater on the sidewalk in Berkeley?” Or –

“How about if we go to Voodoo Donut in Portland? You can buy a voodoo-doll donut and stand on the street, pricking it with a needle so the raspberry filling oozes out like blood. You can mutter darkly about the misdeeds of an ex-boyfriend, or something, while I stand a few yards away and clutch my chest, fall to the ground…”

I found excuses at the time not to act on either idea – a good sign that they fall outside of my comfort zone. And that, of course, meant that I’d have to do something similar soon.

So here it was: not as creative as the Voodoo Donut idea, not as interesting as the improv surely would have been, given that the instigator of that idea actually knows her way around a theater. But something that scared me, nonetheless.

It turned out that my little piece of performance art had nothing on the rest of the week. What takes more courage, really, than to open yourself to loving someone, with all your flaws, with all their flaws, with all that risk of being hurt – in small ways, today, and maybe in bigger ways in the future?

The commitment I made to myself this week was to show up every day, with all the questions and vulnerability that love can bring, and be as authentic as possible. It may not sound scary, but it was.

One of the things we talked about this week was what love means to each of us. Well, actually we only talked about what it means to him, because what he said caught me off-guard and left me sort of babbling. It was something like this:

“When I say I love you, it means I love all of you, including the parts I may not like as much. It means I love the whole package, and that I also love the people who matter to you, because they are a part of you.”

In other words, it sort of sounded like “I applaud you, celebrate you, just for being.”

Yikes.

At that talent show, after we jumped up and down and shouted and clapped, I asked the man on the receiving end what it was like. He said that it felt like a physical wave pushing toward him, almost like he had to step back at the force of it.

Funny how when we finally hear what we’ve been longing for, it can scare our socks off.

The Frigid Waters of Truth

The summer I turned nine I read at least one Harlequin romance novel a day, curled up in a tiger-striped beanbag chair in our living room in the Oregon countryside and dreaming of the day I’d get out and see the world.

If you’ve ever read one of those Harlequin romances, you’ll know that they’re full of dark handsome strangers and exotic locations. Greek millionaires sequestering English-Rose heroines on their private islands. That kind of thing.

Obviously, in reading hundreds of those novels at age nine, I was working something out in my head – something about life and how I wanted to live mine, and about relationships between women and men. I think I decided (because even at age nine I knew that life was unlikely to work out so neatly) that men came in two versions: adventurous and charming, or stable and trustworthy and somewhat dull.

So I grew up and went out into the world, just as I’d planned. And I lived in some exotic places, and met some handsome strangers.

And then one day, early last week, I started to think about how, in these last years of working in emergencies in places like Chad and Pakistan and Haiti, I’ve been running into a lot of men who are adventurous and charming, but who haven’t always been particularly stable and trustworthy.

And I started to think about how I, along with most of the other people I know who’ve spent time working in emergencies, sometimes operate in a sort of “emergency mode,” even when I’m not in an emergency.

I started to wonder how I measure up myself, when it comes to that old “adventurous vs. stable” question. And I started to be drawn to getting the real story behind things, rather than choosing to imagine how things might or might not be. Something about stability meaning facing up to the truth, even when that truth might not be what I’d wish.

This week has been about diving into the “frigid waters of truth,” as my friend Joe calls it. I wrote to a colleague asking for the email of the blog editor for a major psychology website (scary and truth-facing because I’d love to have this blog posted there but am aware that its style may not mesh). I suggested to another that we consider the possibility of bringing nonviolent communication to Kosovo; I asked a writing professor, who told me years ago that some of my ideas were good and others were “inane,” about working with him again; I asked a man who was checking out my bum for his opinion, “no sugar-coating.” (Only another person who shares my admitted obsession with this topic can understand how scary THAT was!).

On Friday, I was in another city. Since coming back to the US, I’ve found myself moving around a lot and seeking distraction. I was leafing through a book at a yoga studio and saw a quote: Something sage and, well, yogic about how we only come home to ourselves when we slow down and stay in one place.

“That’s it,” I thought. “That’s the scary thing for tomorrow: stay in one place and really look at the areas in my life where I’m running away from that more stable side of myself.”

Ironically, I got my car stuck on a muddy, sloping driveway when I drove home that night and was unable to drive anywhere until this afternoon. So I’ve had every opportunity to “come home to myself” for the past two days. Be careful what you wish for, eh?

I did it, though. I made a list of the things I’ve been avoiding, those things that are necessary but not a whole lot of fun (taxes, travel claims for my last job in India, cleaning out the car…), and started working on it.

When I warned Joe that “Frigid Waters of Truth” might end up being the title of my blog post today, he replied:

“Actually, I have found the waters of truth to run tepid and lukewarm in comparison to the heat of exaggerated dread and the chill of the undone.”

Maybe it’s not about being stable or adventurous, but instead about having the courage to be real – the courage to really look truth in the eye.