Dollars and Sense
Sunday, May 23, 2010
♥ Sunday, May 23, 2010
It is settled. The home's now just a house. What was once a place to live is now a place to reside. And the rationale behind it is a simple one: money. See the problem with money, i have learnt, is that it makes everything way too transitory. A business lasts as long as financial capital and assets are in excess over incurred debts. The comfort of a service or a ride lasts as long as one can afford. The sick lives as long as his wallet allows. A home remains as long as its investment value is lucrative. After that, it is all gone. Life is fleeting as it is. Money accelerates this.
When money accelerates life, it exhausts the one non-negotiable and non renewable resource: time. We are a treasure trove of memories. Memories are what we accumulate through time. And time connects meanings to objects. The autogate and its idiosyncratic clang everytime it is opened is attached to the arrival or departure of a person in the family. It either means dad is back or mum is going to work. Lying on the bed, i stare at the dust filled fluorescent light that brought memories of the first and only time i cleaned it about a decade ago. I think about the parquet flooring between my bed and my cupboard. I lie there to sleep on Sundays and after late night outs and also when I've made certain hygiene compromises. In a simple signature all would be fading remnants of the past. The memories and the meaning in exchange for the money. Maybe that is why they call it cold, hard cash.
But of course we got to be practical.
Practical. That is the language that our culture uses today. It is the cement by which money finds its philosophical support. They call it the need for income. Income. What a misguided word. What comes in? A number of digits that represent two things. First, the value of the bills in a locked drawer in an isolated room with metal bars that you probably never see in a lifetime; and second, the duration of the time you never used to love and never got to be loved.
I think that this post seeks only to highlight the pitfalls of this pursuit in an in-your-face, say-it-like-you-see-it manner. It neither seeks to offer advice nor aims to paint a rosier picture. At the end of the day, the pitfall is a simple and sad one: we end up incurring a human cost to avoid a financial one- this makes the dollars but no sense.