Keeping Treasures

"For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

Matthew 6:21

***********

Dear Kate,

Here's a most important question: What is really important in your life?

I know, it sounds trite and too general and far from the kind of obscurity disguised as profundity you might expect from me.  So let me explain.

I am talking about what we can really make use of to live a good, meaningful life, like money, knowledge, an education, a career, stuffs we can use to generate apparent and sustained results.

If this still sounds trite let me assure you it's not from me.  It might have to do with how we have already assumed this is what we've been doing all along with and for our life, to gather useful things, that we don't know why we should stop ourselves now and ask.

My son would say, at least once a week, usually at the dinner table, always after I asked  in the passing of his premature departure from it about his schoolwork, that school is useless, that most of the stuffs he needs to learn aren't gonna do him no good to get a job or be of any usefulness outside of getting a pass for that particular class.  The irony never troubled him that he's complaining like a (mis)educated sophist, or that "flattening the curve" does have to do with the x and y and parabolas of life, stuffs categorically useless in his book.  Or that the "book" he holds to judge usefulness didn't fall from the sky or its creation his to claim.

So what are the really useful things in your life?

Everyday we gather ourselves the elements of our story, deposits into our narrative bank account, if you will.  We might think, say, money is what we are gathering to make life flourish, but no: a huge amount of resources invested into an impoverished story-line makes a magnificently poor Man.

So money, besides being invisible and very susceptible to evaporation, is not useful until there's a story worthy of our investment.  How about our career?  It defines us in the most significant way, doesn't it?  And many of us know this deeply and truly now: no work means no money, too much time on our hands, feeling ourselves useless, no planning for vacation, cutting down on expenses, no need for make-up and new clothes and gone with these also our self-worth and a vision for our future (usually with an early and worry-free retirement at the rainbow's end).

So if all is lost with the loss of our career, then may I suggest the obvious, that a career in and of itself is not really that "useful" to us?  You are a pragmatic, purpose-driven career woman who thrives daily on having good value judgement, tell me: If something, due to fault of your own or not, force local or global or even cosmic, can be lost overnight and with it almost everything else that is you, would you say that thing is useful and of great importance to your living a good, meaningful life?

This is not a rhetorical question, no no.  Because I am sure most of us would answer, "Yes, of course," and for very sensible reasons.  For example, just because something can be taken away doesn't make it useless.  Or how about: when that thing was still there, it was really really really useful to me for all intents and purposes.

The real question I was asking is the implication of our answer.  If all can be lost with that one loss, then we must start to count our cost, because any next minute can be our pay-up time.

I know it is hard to imagine, but do try.  Try to imagine you don't need to go to work after today.  No need to spice it up to assume it has to do with a shameful act on your part to land yourself there.  Let's just say it's due to the pandemic, no fault of your own.  Tomorrow will be your pay-up time.  Your life is gonna come knocking on your door early morning, the time you'd usually wake up for your first coffee (only that tomorrow you would rather have a pill to stay in bed), and ask you to show her your bank book.  

She, your life, wants to know, if she can draw from the narrative bank account in which you've been making deposits, elements you've spent decades to gather and save up in the name of making her, your life, a good, meaningful, beautiful, flourishing one.  She wants you to show her your treasures, stuffs that she really really really needs now to keep her beauty and meaning.  She needs badly to make good use of the things you claimed useful to her.

So show her what you have.

Yours, Alex