Do Your Posessions Posess You?
Recently I have had a number of conversations that have made me ponder.
The conversations all follow a similar direction: we discuss a current purchase (house/car) or promotion that initially seems fantastic. When we come to discuss how the purchase/promotion will affect the future, more often than not, life has become more limited. It is soon apparent that restrictions come with growth.
Jo has just started an incredibly gorgeous family. With a little one in tow, life has got busier, but fuller. The little house has also got fuller with all the necessary purchases that come with a growing baby.
Any parent can tell you that children cost money, life changes and sacrifices have to be made - but it’s completely worth it! For many this means that both parents have to work to make ends meet and childcare has to be juggled to greater or lesser extent.
Unfortunately maternity leave rolled to an end and Jo dragged herself back to work part-time. It is just two days a week, but Jo hates to be out at work and not at home with Ben. Yet driven by financial necessity, she has no choice. Indeed, Jo’s part-time salary completely covers the cost of her car which she had recently updated. Her brand new, roomier model, is great for getting to work and carting Ben around.
Jemma and Adam have been renting for years waiting for their dream home to come along. It just did and they’ve poured all they have into getting it and decorating it. It looks beautiful. Mortgaged up to the hilt however and they need both incomes. Adam now can’t go back to college and re-train and their plans of working abroad together now won’t be possible.
Luke, a great friend from uni days, made it big in PR while the rest of us were travelling, studying and doing bar work after graduation. Somehow he ended up with a fantastic Flat in the city, a semi-flash (but slightly odd looking car) and just the most gorgeous lifestyle of great holidays and good living. Over catch-up drinks, he mentions a wish to be writing like a friend of ours, but dismisses it as impractical when encouraged. It is really unstable (as our mutual friend has found) and wouldn’t be able to support his life that ‘lives up to his salary’. Good point.
Who's in control?
It’s all reasonable. It’s all sound. Though it seems to be just a little un-reason-able, on occasion, for people, their plans and dreams, to be controlled by the things they own. When did this reasoning happen?
It's your choice
Jo could have bought second-hand and not gone to work; Jemma & Adam could have not bought that house and could have lived their dream; Luke could have made the career change and down-scaled the Moet consumption. They are all choices; and there isn’t necessarily a wrong choice to make. What scares me is that my friends all believed that they didn’t have one.
That’s life. Right?
Written by Sarah Bainbridge.
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