🧭Wealth is within
We are now three months from our full-time move to our tiny house 2000 miles away. So, last Wednesday we headed for the beach to say goodbye. We wanted to reminisce on all the memories, years ago, when the beach was a movie set for our relationship, a scene for all the feels.
We didn't make it to the beach. We didn’t have the patience required to sit in the lines of traffic. Everyone else was excitedly headed for their movie set of happiness, and it just wasn’t worth it for our one-last-time mission. So we drove over a median and headed North to a scrap of bay coast in a national memorial celebrating Spanish colonization with water soaked, barely legible fiberglass cut outs of Spaniards and the original Floridians. We hung out in the mangroves and told our stories to each other.
My anxiety crept up as we headed toward old stomping grounds. The streets, the stop lights, the crush of traffic, the wealthy doors I had knocked on. It took some effort, then, to feel my feet in the sand, to tune out the boat traffic, to find the joy I had once felt along this water’s edge.
When I first moved to Florida in the depth of The Great Recession, I had couch surfed at my grandparents' house trying to reassemble what was left of my life post-divorce. These weeks allowed for Tuesdays at the beach with my dog and the sun. There was nothing of importance demanding my attention. I had a sliver of autonomy, an eye in the center of the hurricane.
Very quickly, though, the pressure to be productive and get back to the career path shoved me into a job hunt and the scarcity mindset of never being, having, making enough. I was off - launched into the marathon of more education, job boards, mortgage applications, performance dashboards, corporate conformity, all while multi-tasking and comparing myself to the ever-present more-successful others, the ones who lived in those houses in certain neighborhoods.
On Wednesday as my mindful breaths and the feeling of the sun slowly brought me into my own presence on the shore, I looked around at the yachts, the mansions, the bright displays of status and realized that I don’t belong in this script anymore. I no longer yearn for visible evidence of my worth. The massive walls on manicured lawns, the bulging hulls gliding across the brackish bay seem like relics of a bygone mindset. I no longer seek status. I only seek ownership of my time, creativity and meaningful work. Wealth is within.
