Zen and the Art of Managing Money
Query: Who is the Wisest Person You Know?
I asked my friend Patricia Ryan Madson who was the wisest person she knew and she said it was the Zen teacher John Tarrant. She then sent me an article by him:
Our representations are fragile and based on poor data. The mind assigns value to events, saying, “This is good,” and “This is bad,” but the values we give things are usually just arm-waving and scrambling about…
Happiness is not really related to having a bank account; if it were, most of the world would be doomed to being unhappy. I have a friend who, for reasons mostly unrelated to foresight, drew her money out before the financial crash. I also have a friend who saw it coming and made money from it. I have another friend whose investment advisor put all his money in Bernard Madoff’s ponzi scheme and presumably lost it. I asked this last friend what the symptoms of money loss were, and he left a voicemail: “Well, I have a previously unsuspected interest in cooking and in fixing up the kitchen. And sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and my left leg is twitching. That’s about it.” When you really look at what your situation is, it is not what you might have thought. My friend who lost his money is not visibly more unhappy than the other friends.
The hard bits of life might not be the ones you are dreading. The good bits might be the ones that are always available—a slant of light through the garden and then the rain, running inside to get dry, cooking for friends, the sound of a bird in the early morning when you can’t get back to sleep, the act of impulsively giving something away when you have almost nothing. When you are present in your own life, it extends infinitely in every direction.
I do not have the spiritual awakeness/awareness where I would find new interests in cooking and remodeling if I lost all my money in a financial scam.
This is good, this is bad.
Do you know of the parable of the Taoist farmer? It’s worth reading (3 mins). The Taoist farmer’s horse runs away, brings three wild horses back, his son breaks his leg training one of the wild horses, his son’s broken leg physically disqualifies him from fighting in the war, and so on. The lesson is responding to every life event with equal equanimity, not dividing life into lucky or unlucky, good or bad, like, as the article says “piles of laundry.” The farmer experiences all of life as One Thing, undifferentiated energy/consciousness.
“The Great Way is not difficult for those without preferences.” - The Third Chinese Patriarch of Zen
Again, I haven’t reached that level of embodied wisdom. If I lost all my money to Bernie Madoff, I’d be pissed. Afraid. Angry. I have a friend whose parents lost everything in their bank accounts due to identity theft. I would not respond thinking it was undifferentiated energy/consciousness.
The advantages of driving a shitty car
My friend Christine tells a great story about driving around an old beater in her 20s and getting into a fender bender. The other person was driving an old beater too. They both got out of the car, inspected the damage, and shrugged. Who cares if you have an extra bump when you’ve already got so many! They both laughed, and got back into respective cars and drove away. No insurance companies involved, no repairs needed, no egos upset. Instead they got this great story. Not driving a “nice” car can make you feel wealthy, if being wealthy is the ability not to worry about money.
“The rich have money. The wealthy have time. It is easier to become wealthy than rich.” —Kevin Kelly
For years, I drove this 1993 Toyota truck.
It was the funnest car to drive: manual transmission, no power steering. I felt like I was connected to the road, driving a machine. My friends would laugh because whenever I drove, other cars would get out of my way; no one wants to get into an accident with a guy driving a shitty old truck.
Our conversations about our money
If being wealthy is the ability not to worry about money, I know a lot of people who have a lot of money who are not wealthy.1 One of my mentors, Lynne Twist (Soul of Money), said that “we don’t live in our lives, we live in the conversations we have about our lives.” The stories we have about our lives and our money (our “life sentences”) determine how we feel about our lives.
As a financial spiritual coach and personal finance teacher, I get into very interesting conversations about money. People usually start with vagaries: “I am barely getting by”, “I spend too much,” “I don’t make enough money.”
I’ve learned that these phrases are functionally meaningless. Without numbers, we’re simply living in our conversations about money without actually talking about money itself. Near the end of FF1, students construct their budgets and share them with each other. It is a vulnerable and powerful moment. Why? Because there is a concreteness to budget numbers. Constructing a budget and sharing numbers with classmates gives people a jolt of reality.2 The person making $450k a year and spending $450k a year and the person who makes $20k a year and spending 20k a year both think they are “getting by.” (These are real people) This is not to disparage the person making and spending $450k a year; without ever examining their own budget, or seeing what other people spend, how would they know? It likely took more courage for that person to reveal their budget than the other person.
Transparency and community have a wonderful way of communicating reality. A simple truth: you don't know what is invisible to you. What we’re talking about is consciousness, and how do you know what you’re not conscious to? And it’s humbling, but ultimately empowering, to see what of your own hidden behaviors and assumptions have controlled your life. Father Richard Rohr says the truth will set you free, but it will first shame you.3 As Carl Jung said, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
Spread the word: FINANCIAL FREEDOM 1 COHORT THIS JULY-AUGUST
I’m in control
We spend the first half of our lives seeking self-efficacy and agency. These are good things; Financial Freedom is based on taking control of your finances to break away from capitalism’s work/spend cycle. When you gain financial freedom, you gain a certain personal authority, i.e. “self-authorship. All really important things for the first half of life.
But when I look back at my life, the most important things that happened to me were events I had no control over. My parents sending me away to live with my aunt and uncle. The firing from my tech lawyer job in my 20s. The heartbreaking breakup in my 30s. Any financial setbacks I’ve had, like the Philly Chinatown condo foreclosure, pale in comparison. When my life is over, I’ll look back and see that the things life had planned for me were more important than the plans I had for myself. If you take a look back, I suspect you’ll see the same thing.
The mind assigns value to events, saying, “This is good,” and “This is bad,” but who’s to say? It’s the things you didn’t ask for that make you. The major illness, the divorce, the death of a loved one, the job loss. All things that led to the Light after the Darkness after the Light. You don’t surrender your ego from success, you surrender it from failure.
And the irony is we spend so much of our time, energy, and money (because really, they are the same thing) avoiding those things. So much of our lives obsessively buttressing and polishing our egos. We seek ever-escalating levels of comfort and control and then wonder why we find our lives so bleached and empty.
In the first half of our lives we seek control. But our representations of what “good” and “bad” are fragile and based on poor data; the values we give things usually turn out to be foolish and temporary (do you still want the same things you wanted in high school?). In the second half of our lives we learn to broaden our gaze and let go.
We spend so much of our lives trying to control the conditions of life. We spend so much money and energy thinking: I’ll be happy when.
What would the world look like if I didn’t put conditions on me loving it? If there’s anything I’ve learned that seems like wisdom, it is:
Instead of trying to manipulate the outside world to fit your conditions, see every situation as yet another chance to see the world differently.
The wisest person I know, Terces Englehart, once told me that nothing is fully understood until it is understood with love. As such, I try to see my entire life with gratitude. Like with the Taoist farmer, everything belongs: the bachelorhood, the amazing dog, the torn Achilles, the financial freedom, the difficult childhood, the intellectual gifts, all of it as undifferentiated grace. All of these things, including everything going on inside of me, belonging to me. My only job to be grateful for it.
“If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.” —Meister Eckhart
The goal is not happiness, it is aliveness. And we aren’t really be alive if we don’t accept everything about our lives. We’re blocking out our own experience. As Francis Weller says, “the goal of a mature adult is to hold gratitude in one hand and grief in the other, and be stretched large by them.” When you are present in your own life, it extends infinitely in every direction.
How much of our time and money, indeed our lives, is spent avoiding this process?
Who is the wisest person you know?
I’ve gotten really interested in the idea that we spend a lot of time looking for more information. We’re a knowledge-obsessed culture. But I don’t know how much time we’re thinking about wisdom. So in the last few weeks I have been asking my friends this question: Who is the wisest (not smartest) person you personally know? What about them makes them wise to you? The answers have been interesting and I’ve come to some thoughts. I’d love to hear from you and get a larger sample size! Would you answer this short 3 question survey?
SURVEY: WHO IS THE WISEST PERSON YOU KNOW?
I’m super excited to read your answers. Thank you!!
For me, read my post last year: Carol is not rich, but she is wealthy.
And as my friend Annie Bickerton says, spirituality is learning to love reality.
So he prays for at least one small humiliation per day haha.