Blog 395 – 09.05.2016

The lust for life, the desire for more, the wish to extend ourselves are all three aspects of the hunger that gives us something to get out of bed for each morning. It is sad that often for way too many of us and for way too much of the time what gets us out of bed is the perceived need to pay bills so its off to work we go. Life is more than bills and life is more than work.

I am from a generation, The Baby Boomers, who were raised by a generation affected by the Great Depression, World War II and worked very hard to provide a better life for their children than they had known. Because they had so little money for the niceties as children they wanted their children to have everything they wanted.

My Mama wanted my brother and I to have Christmases with toys an tinsel, candies and turkey dinners like in the magazines. And so beginning just before Thanksgiving and throughout the Christmas season she would work at a Dime Store to raise extra money for our Christmas. Dad being much more practical never saw the sense in this but spoiled us too in his own way and was much freer with the little money he had that Mom was. He did not like to shop, to him it was a man thing, but if you could get him in a store you could talk him into getting you any thing you wanted. Mom was more practical with money except when it came to Christmas and even then it was a calculated trade of her time for money that made that possible and she knew it.

Time is money. And any gift that costs money is an investment of the time it took to earn it. Still life is more than money and what it can buy. My generation was accused of not having the same “work ethic” as our parents, of feeling entitled, of being “spoiled” and many of us have perpetuated that old stereotyped thinking about the successive generations. But there is nothing wrong with wanting more out of life than buying and selling, working and paying bills. The best gifts my parents ever gave me were priceless and could not be bought or sold then or now with money. Their time and attention, their stories born out of life, these are my inheritance. Both my parents have been gone for almost a generation, twenty years, but what they gave me lives on in me, in my children, and in all in whom we have invested our time and attention. We can never love enough or give enough to those we love but love is miraculous in that it still ends up being enough somehow.

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White