I've Never Seen A U-Haul Following a Hearse

In our Free Store conversation on Friday morning we continued our month long exploration of issues of wealth and poverty.  Our tagline for the month is "Stop Buying Shit and Shop at the Free Store."  We are having some fun with the whole Anti-consumerism April thing as well as some growing pains as many of us are discovering how deep rooted is this insatiable impulse to buy stuff.

We started the conversation by talking about no matter how much we have it is never enough.  Our reach always seems to exceed our grasp when it comes to money.  We looked at a text in Ecclesiastes that says that if you love money you will never have enough of it and that if you love wealth you will never be satisfied with your income.  Sheila said that even though you need money it doesn't make you happy.

Someone brought up the TV show Buried Alive that goes inside the homes of extreme hoarders to explore the psychology of it.  This made us smile as we talked about how attached we become to things and how such attachments aren't always healthy.  We become so attached to our things because we start to view them as an extention of ourselves.  This is why we feel violated when someone steals something of ours.  But this is why it can actually be liberating to lose things because it can free us from our attachment to stuff that can't make us happy and doesn't define who we are.  Having more stuff doesn't make us more of a person and having less stuff doesn't diminsh who we are.  At this point our friend Larry walked into the room and gave Sheila a rose that he had cut from one of the bushes at the warehouse.  We all thought that was a very sweet gesture and Sheila was very pleased with it.

Someone brought up how someone might stay in a marriage with a person they don't really love just for the money.  Sheila got us laughing when she talked about meeting her husband Dave.  At the time he was homeless and only had a couple pairs of pants and a couple shirts but she saw his heart and loved him, and the rest, as they say, is history.

We talked about how being rich might seem like the solution to all our troubles but we decided that is not a realistic way of thinking.  Someone said that the more you have the more you have to lose which gives you more to worry about.  We talked about how you could have a very high paying job and yet still be miserable because you don't like what you do at work.  Mark said that if you don't like your job you have a lot of time to be miserable.  For some reason this led us to talk about our favorite jobs.  Rick said his favorite job was as head teller at a bank.  George said that he liked working at a factory that made steel doors even though he was having issues at home with his wife at the time.  Sheila said her favorite job was working for AT & T.  Mark said that he enjoyed doing home renovations and he told us about a friend that used to tell him to find work that he enjoyed and that the money would follow.  Interestingly Mark got a phone call during our discussion and later told us that he was hired to start working on Monday morning for which he was very happy.

We talked about how we bring nothing with us into the world and that we take nothing with us when we depart, naked we come and naked we go as it says in the good book.  Sheila made us laugh when she asked why it was so important to wear clothes all the time.  We talked about how the Egyptian King's used to have their stuff buried with them but that when the archaelogists dig up their tombs up the stuff is still there.  We laughed a bit imagining how disappointed they must be when they arrive at their destination without their extensive luggage!  Mark told us that his grandmother used to tell him, "I've never seen a U-Haul following a hearse."

As our conversation moved toward a conclusion we looked at another text in Ecclesiastes that says, "it is good for a person to eat, to drink and to find satisfaction in their toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given them—for this is their lot."  Someone mentioned a scene in the movie Antz in which the ant character voiced by Woody Allen says, "It's my lot in life, it's not a lot but it's my life."  It really is a gift to find enjoyment in our lives and our work and not worry so much about the money.