Caddickisms

I’ve got a swirl of thoughts going on in my head at the moment. This one’s gonna ramble. Hopefully it comes out making some kind of sense.

I want to end my life. Well, part of it anyway. I would prefer to continue breathing, let’s just get that straight right away.

I want to excise the part of myself that wants “stuff.” Wanting stuff is the pursuit of temporary pleasure. As soon as I get something I want, I feel better for a little while, then I want “stuff 2.0.” All that stuff costs money. That means I have to work, because I haven’t figured out how to get paid for doing nothing yet. That takes time from other tasks I have to do. Time is finite, so I have to figure out how to get those other tasks done faster, which means either paying someone else to do it for me, or buying some other “stuff” that helps me get it done faster. But that means I need more money, so I can pay for that, which means I have to work more.

Nothing new there. You see where I’m going. It’s the same cyclical problem everyone has on one level or another.

I want to drop out of that cycle. I could. I know I could. For example, I could sell my current house and move someplace smaller and cheaper. It’s an option. Other people have survived with much less than I have. I won’t though. I like it here. It’s too hard to give up what I have now.

That makes me think of how hard it is for a rich man to enter heaven. When approached by a rich man wanting to know what he must do to gain eternal life, Jesus said he should sell all his possessions and give it away to the poor. In other words, he had to stop coveting “stuff.” (if you’re wondering, the passage is Matthew 19:16-30). There was a time when I thought I’d have no problem with that. That was before I had this much stuff. Intellectually, I knew what the story meant, but now I feel the guy’s pain. It’s hard. In fact, not only do I not want to give up stuff… I want more stuff.

That gets me to thinking about church. I used to be much more involved in church activities. Part of me feels like I’m not involved enough now, but I am in the choir and a small group, and I’m not sure I’m willing to commit more time right now.

And then there’s the heart of the matter: the choir connection that at some level probably kick-started this post much earlier today (well, yesterday, at this point as I write this after 3am). A friend of mine from choir has cancer. It’s apparently progressing very quickly, and hospice has recently been mentioned. I haven’t seen him since early this summer, before he was diagnosed. He and his wife are very active in our church. He’s a very nice, happy, intelligent, funny, godly, loving man. He’s one of the first people to offer help in any circumstance and has been a source of support when my family was going through some tough stuff over the last 5 years. I have an immense amount of respect for him, and it pains me greatly that he’s going through this, as does the knowledge that he may not be around for much longer.

Thinking about that and other reminders of mortality coincided with another friend of mine reflecting on “Hurt” as performed by Johnny Cash. He noted that the video for that song shows Cash “sitting there looking back on all that he had accomplished and realizing that, save a few precious things (his faith, his wife, his kids), it was all meaningless.”  “Stuff” isn’t in that list. I imagine my choir friend is having some of those same thoughts.

I need to end this life as it currently exists, and refocus. The way I want to live and the way I’m living are not lining up as well as I’d hope. I’ve got a lot of inertia, though, and I’m lazy. It’s hard to get started.

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Tags: faith, family, Johnny Cash, life, money

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 5:52 pm and is filed under Other, Personal finance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.