One Way to Be Rich

Alas, the many summer projects bouncing around in my brain’s possibilities department require money. So, as I said to a coworker at our end-of-the-year picnic Friday, “I’m trying to learn contentment.”
“Yes,” he said. “There are two ways to be rich. One way is to have a lot of money, and the other is to be happy with what you have.”

“If I’m ever rich,” I replied, “it will most likely be the latter kind.”

I’m sure my bemoaning our financial status would strike most people in the world as completely ridiculous: I’m already rich, with a wonderful house to live in, met needs, and many met wants, not to mention the things I have that money can’t buy, like family and good health. Just look at our gardens:

Are we wealthy? No doubt. These pictures don’t even show the berries patches or orchard.

However, that global perspective gets clouded by more immediate Things I Want to Do: move the electric pole from the middle of our front yard ($1,500); replace our car with a minivan ($15,000); relocate our wood stove ($2,000), move our kitchen ($10,000); and the list goes on and on and on. And on. I doubt $100,000 would even take care of it–just for starters.

I’ve always been this way. My favorite adolescent reading was Gander Mountain catalogs, and my parents had to maintain tight control over my paper route earnings. Their general rule of thumb was, “Think about it for a week, and then we’ll talk about it.”

That took care of many of my ideas then, but now my desires lack neither longevity nor practicality. Maybe a week would have been enough time for me to forget about that little plastic audio mixer with a built-in mic and two tape decks for disc jockeying parties (which I never had, anyway), but now that our band is becoming established, my want for a sound system feels more grounded.

All that said, the limiting factor of our cash flow means that our spending glacier is not threatened by global warming, and so moderation and contentment are more than ever necessary for the learning.

Fortunately, as my dad told me my uncle says, there are always free projects to work on. So I’d better get busy.