Simple Prosperity

by David Wann

  Dear Mom,

  The radically honest conversation (okay, shouting match) you and I had in our cottage during the family reunion prompted me to write. You truly care about my well-being, and I really appreciate that! You want me to be successful, the same way I hope your life and my own kids’ lives are successful.

  The question is, successfully what? When I confided that last year was a financial challenge, you were worried. “A person needs to have enough to live a good life, and to provide for later years,” you said. You also seemed to be saying, “Work harder. Make more money. Go back and get a real job again—quick.”

  When I told you that despite the meager income I had one of the best years of my life, you seemed skeptical. I guess you didn’t realize how much meaning the work has for me, and how inspired I was by the insights of the people I interviewed for the film I was working on. In combination with good friends, family, and continuing play in building the community garden, it was enough. I didn’t need much money.

  When I recently served two very large bowls of organically grown salad from the garden to a group of forty appreciative friends, that also felt like success—good work that we could taste and crunch, and feel proud of. When I went into a music store the other day that stages jam sessions and somebody remembered a song I’d sung six years earlier, I considered that a success, even though it had nothing to do with money.

  Last week I got an e-mail thanking me for a talk I gave, telling me that one woman had tears in her eyes because I was speaking from my heart. Wasn’t that success, in a real sense? And when I went in for a physical the other day and the doctor told me I had the heart of someone half my age, that felt like success, too, because of all the exercising and healthy food I’ve chosen to eat.

  At breakfast that morning in California, you told me I shouldn’t be so demonstrative about my convictions, because I’ll turn people off, and I won’t be successful. But the way I look at it, unless I express my hopes and suggestions for a more livable future, I can’t be successful in the full sense of the word. There’s too much evidence now that our young, boisterous economy has designed and mined itself into a very dangerous corner.

  That’s why I’m writing, Mom. I feel an urgent need to communicate my concern that our country has lost its way, whether or not that brings in money. I want to help find and present better trails. I’m OK, Mom. I think you already know that I need to “do my own thing.” And you also know how much I love and appreciate you, right?

  Love,

  Dave

  That particular year, I’d made less money than some households spend on facelifts for their suburban backyards: state-of-the-art barbecue “stations,” tractor-style lawn mowers, and upscale professional stonework for the perennial beds. (I’d also made less money than society spends annually on the average prisoner—about $35,000; but, in contrast, I was out of jail.) For the most part, I was happy, partly because the decisions were mine. Money wasn’t the game I was playing. My sister Susan confided recently that she, too, had debated with my mother about whether or not I was successful. She’d used rhetoric like this: “Why do people need money? They need it to bring up their kids, and Dave’s kids are doing fine—both are college graduates and both are happy. People need shelter, and he owns a great house in a neighborhood he helped design. They need health—he has that; they need something stimulating to do, and his work seems to turn him on. They need occasional breaks from everyday life, and in recent years, he’s been to New Zealand, Vietnam, Costa Rica, the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Alaska, Guatemala … People need someone to love and his girlfriend, Susan, is wonderful.” She concluded that however much money I was making, it was apparently enough. After thinking about it in those terms, our mom had agreed—what a relief!

  My partner, Susan, made strategic scripting decisions, too, and doesn’t regret them for a minute. In her children’s formative years, she took twelve years off from a stimulating career as a computer software expert because the kids were her priority. Toward the end of a career distinguished by many awards and achievements, she did the math and opted for an early retirement even though senior managers offered her a small fortune to move up the ladder and direct a whole department.

  I’m not suggesting that to create a good script a person has to leave her or his 9-to-5 job! What I am suggesting is that it’s a relief to know our own minds, and know what we stand for, and what we are willing to stick our neck out for. I read a great newspaper story last week about a guy, Jim Reddick, who works in a supermarket in the state of Washington. He’s become a local hero for going the extra mile with customers. When he does deliveries to seniors, he brings not only groceries but books they might want to read, medicine from the drugstore, or much-needed sweatpants he’s found for them, on sale. He checks the mail for them, takes out the garbage, even gives them a lift to town. At the supermarket, old-timers wait in line to have Jim check out their groceries, even when other checkers are available. You might say that Reddick’s script has a wealth of character development.1

  What will our life stories look like in our last years? Here’s hoping that all the people involved with this book—readers, editors, writer, reviewers, binders, printers, and all those I’ve quoted or interviewed—are happy in our final years because we’ve all made good decisions and had good experiences! (And if not, maybe we’ll get another shot as zebras, orchids, or at least slime molds). I was curious what stories people tell at the end of their lives, and asked my friend Jonathan to tell me what he hears as a hospice chaplain.

  Living and Dying Like a Racehorse

  For a man who’s just thirty years old, Jonathan Daniel has acquired a lot of wisdom. Some of it comes from rigorous meditation and Buddhist practice; some from his challenging work as a chaplain, where he’s gotten to know more than a thousand people before they died; and some from the fact that his father, an attorney, was murdered when Jonathan was twelve. Death has always been part of his adult life, and he seems to live more mindfully and intensely as a result.

  His daily work begins when he goes into the homes of people who’ve been told they have less than six months to live. His mission is to help them die with strength, comfort, and dignity. If they’re Christians, Jonathan recites scriptures; and if they are Muslims, he finds wisdom in the Koran. “I want to use the truths they’ve been studying throughout their lives to have a conversation about what’s meaningful to them,” he says. Every workday, he deals with two very profound questions: How should we live in the time we have left, and how should we regard death? As we sit in a booth at a busy restaurant, I ask him, “What do people tell you in their last days? What do they value in their lives above all else? What are they most proud of?”2

  “Many of them tell me they’ve always thought they’d take a trip around the world before they die, or buy impressive trophies, like a stylish new car,” he answers. “Instead, what they value in their last days are things like feeling the sun on their face, hearing the intricate beauty of a classical symphony, or smelling the fragrance of a lilac in bloom, out in the backyard. These are the ordinary, everyday surprises that really matter to them, in the end.”

  He takes a sip of beer and continues, “People who live with purpose and dignity seem to die that way. A woman I worked with recently was a successful writer whose husband was also successful at starting a small company. Every week, about fifteen close friends would come to visit her, and it made her feel great to know that she was loved. That’s what people are proudest of—that other people love and respect them. When I came to her house I asked her how she was doing. She shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘Well, you know, I’m dying …’ I asked what she thought was going to happen when she died. She smiled, saying, ‘Wow, that’s unusual for you to ask that! All my friends who come to see me—I can tell they’re uncomfortable about death. They sit down stiffly and to reassure me, they tell me exactly what’s going to happen when I die; what I need to believe; who I should pray to; and what it will
be like, after I die. You’re the first person who’s asked me what I think.’

  I interrupt Jonathan’s story to comment that the friends had as much anxiety as the woman who was dying.

  “We learn to be afraid,” he says, nodding. “So, then I asked her what she would want to have happen, if she could have her way, and she said with a smile, ‘I’d want to come back as a racehorse! I know it sounds kind of crazy—I can’t tell that to my friends—but as I sit here dying I keep thinking how grand it would be to be a racehorse, because they’re so beautiful and majestic, so powerful …’

  “‘I’m wondering if what you’re seeing in the racehorse is what you want right now, as you go through your transition,’”I asked, and she answered, ‘Yeah, actually that’s true—when I see all the grace, all the lack of hesitation, that is what I want as I die …’ Even though she was a Christian, all our conversations became centered on the attributes of racehorses. And it seemed like she did have that sense of strength as she died.”

  I ask Jonathan, “Are most of the people you see afraid of dying?”

  “There’s usually some discomfort, because death represents the unknown, the loss of control, unpredictability—and these are the central issues that people fear. They’re used to things that feel safe and predictable—things they can control. When we’re dying, we lose control of our life. The project is over; there’s no longer anything to maintain. Everything we’ve identified with—our careers, our friends, our ways of thinking, the way we look—is suddenly stripped bare and we’re left with the true face of who we really are. We come face to face with ourselves, and that can be uncomfortable.”

  As Jonathan talks, I’m reminded that the acquisition of material things is often about trying to control life rather than just live it. We surround ourselves with possessions to fortify our lives against uncertainties that lie ahead. It seems apparent that to reduce consumption, we’ll need to be less obsessed with controlling life. After all, we each have a solid seat in the universe, and we’re not likely to fall out, so why waste our lives worrying about death and possessions? Why not focus on what we have rather than what we don’t have? Billions of living creatures die every day—there must be a pattern behind it.

  Jonathan continues, “When people have displayed a tremendous amount of generosity in their lives, and been very giving and thoughtful of others, that seems to diminish their suffering. When I ask them what they want to pray for, they don’t say themselves. They want to pray for their families, for other people in the care center, for the people on the news they recently saw … I find it very poignant, the number of people who are concerned about the survival of the human race. I tell them, ‘Here you are with terminal cancer, talking about your death, and yet you’re concerned about how this world is going to continue after you’re gone …’ Sometimes it’s expressed in a big way, as the entire world of humans as a species, and sometimes at a smaller scale, like how America is going to fare. So there’s this real sense of interconnectedness that hits them. Sometimes they don’t even realize how strong it is until everything else is stripped away.”

  I ask Jonathan what people say about their material goals and possessions at the end of their lives. “They often say that financial wealth gets in the way of family relationships, especially at the end. A few days ago, a man I talked with wanted to have deep, meaningful conversations with the family, but couldn’t because they were so focused on the money, asking for advances on the inheritance, and pressuring him to sell the house. The poor guy wanted to talk about more important things, but they kept coming back to, ‘Mom always said I could have this.’ He told me, ‘I wish they could wait until I die to have these squabbles.’

  “So I think you’re saying that the best way to prepare for death—and also live a quality life—is to become more comfortable with the unknown and the unpredictable?”

  “To live happily and die comfortably, I think we have to give up trying to be in control,” he says. “But at the same time, we can be mindful, and prepared. A man I’m working with right now has taught me a lot about this. I worked with his wife as she died, too; all this stuff came up, all this baggage, all the shadows she’d repressed. But eventually she was able to work through it and die peacefully. The family asked me to perform the funeral service; then, two years later, I get this phone call from their daughter who says, ‘My father wants to be ready for death. He wants the same level of care my mother got, but he wants it now—while he’s healthy and able to do the work. When his death comes, he wants to die consciously and aware.’

  It struck me that the pursuit of real wealth such as mindfulness is a sure way of being ready when death comes.

  Jonathan explains, “So I meet with him once a week and we talk about what he wants to do with his remaining time. He wants to learn how to meditate, to calm his mind and release some of the trivialities he’s been caught up with. The more he lets go of his worries and doubts, the more he tells me, ‘You’ll never believe what happened to me today!’ He’s making friends and having real conversations with them, and feels a great sense of delight. The smallest words of kindness from his daughters completely make his day. Every day is a blessing. He smiles and laughs a lot more than he did just a few weeks ago. Sometimes we’ll sit together in complete silence for ten or fifteen minutes, just looking into each other’s eyes and smiling. ‘When I die,’ he tells me, ‘I don’t want to be overwhelmed by the pain of all my past habits. I want to be present for my death. And I want to learn how to do that now, by becoming present for my life.’”3

  The Value of a Story

  “It is not enough to add years to one’s life; one must also add life to those years,” said John F. Kennedy. One of the most fruitful ways of adding life is to get in the habit of following a script you believe in—based on values that resonate for you. By keeping promises to yourself, you stand a pretty good chance of treating other people—and yourself—well. You become something much bigger than an ego or an appendage of commercial logos. You find activities and passions that match your abilities with the tasks at hand and make the world safer and more sensible. Sometimes, though, the world seems to trap you in your own script. For example, Olympic skier Bode Miller has always skied primarily for the love of it, trusting that the money would follow. And did it ever. With thirteen corporate sponsors, Miller has become a multimillionaire, and isn’t sure what to make of it. “As soon as you have millions of dollars, you literally don’t have money as a motivating force anymore, unless you just simply try to continue to acquire more and more of it,” says Miller. “That process is about as unhealthy as anything else I can think of—so the acquisition of money alone is a terrible, terrible goal.”4

  4

  Mindful Money

  More Value from Better Stuff

  I base my fashion taste on what doesn’t itch.

  —Gilda Radner

  If it works, it’s obsolete.

  —Marshall McLuhan

  I have enough money to last me the rest of my life, unless I buy something.

  —Jackie Mason

  Too many people spend money they haven’t earned to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like.

  —Will Rogers

  No one wants to spend money for products or experiences that don’t deliver value, even if one has money to burn. Whether it’s kitchenware, a car, or a musician for your daughter’s wedding, good quality satisfies but poor quality usually does not. One of the most pleasant changes we are making is learning the difference. We’re moving toward a renewed appreciation of durable, crafted, nontoxic, repairable, fair trade objects and services that communicate a sense of trust and pride. For example, classic clothes never go out of style, tile floors have longer life expectancies than humans do, and timeless cast-iron pans don’t add ingredients not called for in the recipe—such as potentially toxic aluminum or Teflon (except for iron, which our bodies need). The new lifestyle will contain fewer things but better things, an
d the typical household will be less cluttered with junk.

  We all have bedside lamps, but how many of them are expertly designed to swivel right over your book or look back toward the nightstand with a simple adjustment? A great lamp like this can increase the reading you do, and decrease the mindless, sometimes-troubling TV watching before going to sleep. The things we really value are objects that tie into our lives. Someone gave me their used Venetian blinds last month and even helped me install them. Rather than cuss at the sun for glaring on my computer screen, I just close the blinds for twenty minutes while the world turns a bit. My point is, it’s not just a lot of objects we want, but great objects that enrich our lives.

  My favorite possession is a 1967 Gibson J-200 guitar I bought used, thirty years ago. Made from Sitka spruce, maple, and rosewood, the instrument just seems to get better in tone quality all the time. Once owned by country musician Buck Owens, it’s always been my rainy day or after-work standby. When I want to unfocus I let my fingers do the thinking for a while. How much value has it given me? At least fifty times the $500 I paid for it on layaway.