Saving For A Rainy Day

Saving for a rainy day. It really does sound like good advice.

And it is in the sense that living hand to mouth is stressful and unnecessary in many cases (though of course not all).  We want to have a cushion for unexpected events in the form of cash or insurance.

When I was earning big bonuses I measured myself by how much I was able to store away.  It was like I had an internal morality meter that went up the more I saved.

But for what?

Saving for a rainy day becomes an insatiable monster.  There are so many wealthy people with millions in assets saving for a rainy day.

This seemingly responsible principle has become an excuse for denying ourselves today.  And an excuse for not showing up fully with our power and gifts. Which means that our growth, our impact, our health and our feeling of aliveness suffer for the sake of an unknown future so often filled with someone else's dreams. 

It's fear, it's pattern... and it holds us back from life right now.  

Save.  Save for the future you, your family.  Save for education and health care and a vacation home - save for things that you value.  But don't save for the sake of saving.  Save to live.  And live now.

What do you want?  This is the absolute core and key of everything.  Know what you want and where saving is required - save for it.  Rest your financial life on the bedrock of intention and desire.  

What I had to do was recognize that I wanted freedom.  Freedom from the ghosts and fears inside me.  And that was inner work first.  I invested in my inner freedom at a cost my former self would have run from.  And it has and continues to pay off in every single way.  

We do this far beyond money, too.

We have an idea - it's alive, flowing.  And we put it on a list of ideas.  For the future.  Because we have ideas of how we should be working, the value of completing what we have started, things that "have" to be done, things that have been pending for a long time... today is already full. The new idea must wait for tomorrow.

And what happens to that aliveness?  It's gone.  Unexpressed and unused.

What if we lived according to our energy rather than against it?

What if we allowed the natural cycles that flow through us to be what is true?

The same responsibility principle applies.  The key is the fundamental position of freedom with a little bit of a responsibility check for my own benefit rather than the other way round.

Knowing what we want in our deepest selves allows us to break patterns of "not enough" and create the life that we want.

If we want to feel alive we have to foster the aliveness right now.  If we can't feel what we want to feel now will we be able to feel it in the future when we have all that retirement money or finally get to the item on the todo list that we really wanted to do?

Even though everything we have been taught says otherwise, my bank account is my naturalness.  My life is my supply.