riches Soma "Getting rich was the worst thing that ever happened to me." He scrunched his face up, averting my gaze, and continued to gently stroke the fur on the large service dog that followed me through the hospital halls. "Took my whole fucking life to see that. And now, here I am at the end, and the insight is fucking useless." "So... you'd rather be poor?" I countered. "No no. Not being poor was great. No longer needing to worry all the time. Being able to go on holidays. Being able to take care of my mother. Being able to finally afford doctors." He chuckled darkly and added "Being able to pay for all this chemo." "So just not rich then." "Absolutely. Being rich? It just isolated me. It changed every interaction with every other person, because suddenly... suddenly I was the person with the ability to change their life, to fix all their problems, and they knew it. And I knew it. A simple choice on my part could take away so much of their pain. Every interaction felt like it was infected by this inequality between us. It made me BITTER. Made me feel every relationship, even with family, was transactional. I was desperately looking for some genuinely human experience, and I finally had the money to purse those experiences… but simultaneously money excluded me from it all. It made me resent everyone." He sighed, pausing for a moment. It felt strangely quiet here today. Something pensive hung in the air. I wondered if he felt it, and that's why he was talking so much today. Would death come for him soon? The dog nuzzled his hand. Humans, like all animals, had some measure of death. I felt it it drove them to confession in their final moments. I'd seen it often enough. "What I didn't see - what I only see now as I'm dying - is that I could have used that money for good. All of it. I don't mean giving it to some NGO run by other rich people. I mean really using it. "I loved stories - how many indie movies could I have financed? How many books could I have gotten published? And how much could I have built - not just another villa for myself but things that would benefit society in general? Hell, I could have given it away? Made all those lives better. Taken away that pain. "And if at the end of the day I was only left with enough money to be upper middle-class... so what? At least I would have been the person I wanted to be. I'd still be dying here either way." 240111 ... ovenbird I never feel richer than when I am flush with time. Even an hour feels opulent--a shimmering expanse of sixty minutes to spend in beautifully ill-advised ways can feed me for a week. A week devoid of responsibility, spilling over with opportunities to delve into all the things that make me feel might keep me full a year. Some of the best gifts I've received are uninterrupted time. It's what I ask for on mother's day. I am a mother forever, the gift is getting not to be one for a couple hours. After my children were born I had to relearn how to spend time on myself. I believed that any minutes given to my own joy were moments taken from my children. I don't believe this anymore. I cannot be the person they need me to be without a willingness to be extravagant about time. I take what I can without guilt and lavish myself with gifts of attention and connection and presence. This is how I built a deep reserve of care that I can spend on others. It's time that makes us rich--time together, time alone, time in communion with this incredible world, time that is frightening in its scarcity with its value only fully recognized when it is already gone. 250709 what's it to you? who go blather from