In the song “What’s Up,” 4 Non Blondes sing, “So I wake in the morning and I step outside. And I take a deep breath and I get real high. And I scream from the top of my lungs, ‘What’s going on?’ ”
I write about money and daily give my clients money advice: how to feel more secure, how to feel safer, how to make more, keep more, spend more, give more. But right now, in this moment, what’s going on?
For those with financial resources, the markets have treated you kindly. Do you feel safer? Do you feel more secure? Do you have a sense of abundance? If not, this might suggest there is something else going on.
And there is. Money is inanimate. We are only going to spend it or give it away. That’s it. We use it in ways that hopefully provide some sort of salve for our feelings of anxiety or self-worth. We spend it on things we need to exist and to make us feel better or important. We save it to buy a future that will create these things. We pass it on so our children can live in ways we taught them. And we give money away for a host of reasons, including respect, love, care and guilt.
But we can’t spend or give our way out of the discomfort we are feeling right now. Spending might allow us to delay those feelings, but it doesn’t remove them. In all my years of planning, there is only one thing I have found that helps when I want to scream from the top of my lungs, “What’s going on?”
Get quiet.
Turn off the news. Quit doomscrolling. Stop listening to what others are telling you. Get quiet. We know what we need, even if it might be deeply buried in a mountain of shoulds. The only way to find it is to get quiet.
I quit listening to podcasts in the early mornings when I walk our dog. I try to spend some time every day in nature. Each morning, I take a few minutes to focus on four ideas: loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity.
