Money

Many years of my life have been spent with short term goals in mind because the short term was so uncertain while being poor and having little resources to draw from. Days go by, weeks, months, without ever considering what will be happening in the next year, 2 years, 5 years, 10. After all, there is no way to even think about possibilities when you don't even know if you will be in the same house or town. That is how it has been for me since I was a young teen.

Someone recently said to me, "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans." I couldn't agree more. I realized several years ago that as soon as I spoke the words, my fate changed. As soon as I said," I'm going to do (insert clever plan on making money or improving my family's quality of life)," I could literally feel my insides changing to make it difficult or impossible. Even as I listened to "The Secret" on audio a few years ago and thought that she might be onto something and noticed the way I would challenge the Universe to provide my desires and changing my thoughts to make it seem like it was a success when things happened, I could remember all the times I spoke my thoughts and everything grew further out of reach. Do we live by the law of attraction, willing our desires and needs to us, creating our reality? Or, is it more like God laughing as he taunts us with close successes and dreams that never come to fruition as some kind of challenge to live harder and build us up stronger? Well, for me, it is neither because I believe in neither God or fateful Secrets.

The last few weeks have been filled with consuming thoughts of how I am going to make my goals work. How am I going to take charge and make it happen without relying on God or mantras? I am browsing pages of options and then thinking, while looking at train schedules and class schedules for classes I want to take more than a year from now, that it is useless to try to find this info because it will likely change before I have the opportunity to use it. Realizing you can't exactly make plans for 3-5-8-10 years from now down to the details of transportation and time management is defeating.

The harder I look, the further I feel away from my goals and desires. I have to challenge myself about responsibility and attachments and sacrifices, about letting go of old ideas and which ones are worth holding onto. I am sick of reinventing myself. I know what I want to do, but it feels ever so out of reach and it comes down to MONEY.

You see, if you have money you don't have to rely on other people to help you out of the kindness and convenience of their hearts, you pay your way to what you need and desire. If I had money to care for my needs, I could volunteer at any service I wanted to give and we all know, I live to serve my community and the mothers and children and families and even the critters, domestic and wild. Hell, I would tree sit and get arrested at demonstrations. I would camp out in front of the Capital and serve food to the homeless. I would do the gardening at CARDV and take elderly people to the park. I would be a volunteer midwife and serve birthing families as often as I could without any strings attached, if I could feed my own family and secure my own home and their futures.

I could be amazing.... if I had money.