To Spend Life

At a concert this Thursday and through a conversation with Freda, I had a bit of an epiphany.

Friday morning, office job, tired as hell, looking around by contrast. This is not how I want to spend my life. I don’t want to get old, grey, and wither away making a profit for someone else. I honestly didn’t think I had any other option: I’ve been poor as hell. Five years back I would have counted myself lucky to have the job and been fully okay with giving my life up to a company. Honestly, I wasn’t really thinking about it. I was just living to get paid, spend a little on something I liked, pay bills, and repeat.

Taking pride in simply being “allowed” to spend myself that way. Proud to spend my life making money for someone else and scraping by.

I realized I was dying at the concert, dying in the office one moment at a time, spending every second grudgingly because I didn’t want to be there. Because nothing I do in an office matters—every second of my life dropping golden into the abyss.

In conversation with Freda that night, she pointed out that I am essentially spending and have spent this incarnation on worthless things. I’ve spent this incarnation on trying to compete with people with whom I have nothing in common, for people who take advantage of my willingness to perform and eagerness to prove myself worthy.

Freda said, characteristically, that if I am to spend my life consciously, I should spend it well.

This is not my only incarnation, of course. All I am spending is the currency of this incarnation, this body. She quite sensibly pointed out that whatever my qualms about charging people for spiritual work are (and I have previously had them), I am spending myself second by second to serve, and that this should not be cheap.

You are buying my life from me. My whole life. My whole incarnation. It is up to me to set the value, and I will not be cheap, nor will I be working myself into the ground if I don’t want to.