Originally written Friday, February 6, 2015
When we first moved to Vermont, we met a young woman who could manifest things with her mind. She proved it by obtaining a seemingly miraculous array of good things that she genuinely needed but with such rapidity that it felt like magic. Never mind that she was cute, funny, and a veritable damsel in distress. She had mind power!
As much as I wanted to believe that such feats are possible, I knew in my heart that our friend hadn’t manifested with her mind so much as telegraphed her distress. Naturally people flocked to help her. Moreover, her needs weren’t actually that great.
Would that all needs were as simple as a car or an apartment. Those one-offs are easy to manifest. The hard ones are when what you really want is an upgrade of your life.
As it turns out, upgrading your life is a tough goal (although downgrades are easy). Major changes are hard to achieve by any means, including the old fashioned ones like mental effort, strategy, and hard work. You do all the right things, or at least as many of them as you can manage, and still you end up where you started. Is it possible the goal is unattainable? Or is it just that I’m using the wrong means? There are times when you doubt these things.
I’m one of these people who finds life unbearable without a purpose. I can’t do things that seem pointless. It just seems like a waste of time, and for me anyway, time is increasingly precious. But so is money, and that’s where it gets dicey. You find yourself sacrificing time and well-being for money, because (we suppose) money will buy us both. But it doesn’t. Money is a voracious beast. If you make it your goal, it will swallow you whole.
I’ve run across a few examples lately of people who have good jobs with high salaries, but who are miserable at work. Since they spend a lot of time working both in and out of the office, this misery follows them around. I’m jealous of their incomes, but what they go through to earn them doesn’t seem worth it. Then I remember that you can be just as miserable and also be broke, and so the argument continues — to chase money or to try to live without it, that is the question.
Obviously, you can’t “live without it” in 21st century America. That’s just silly. But you may have to live on less than you think you need, and that’s a drag. For the middle class, on whom downward trends are acting, the struggle is to stay middle class — to have enough money coming in to keep living more or less as we have been. This is a negative struggle — we are striving not to fall. Unfortunately, trying not to fall is a never-ending battle. It’s hard to gauge success and you’re never sure if it’s safe to stop doing it.
So we tread water in a veritable sea of uncertainty and wait to be rescued, by a change of times or a change of circumstance or even a magical intervention — we aren’t picky. Meanwhile, the need for meaning and purpose becomes subverted when that purpose becomes “staying afloat.” If nothing else, it sucks energy from the better things we could be “manifesting” if only we had our time and well-being back.
