The Number Does Not Settle

Can one ever be financially comfortable?

Not for an afternoon. Not for a week. Not for a month. Permanently. At peace with the number, whatever the number is.

For most of my adult life the answer has been no. I have never actually been comfortable financially. Peace around the figures in the account has never been a permanent state. It has been a pause between one movement and the next.

The mind hears that and reacts. There is no point in saving. Why does anyone strive to have something in the bank. That behaviour is the leaf of a tree, far from its core foundation. This is not where the exploration is going.

It is an exploration, as far outside judgement as it will allow. If one can never be financially comfortable, what is actually happening when money is earned and saved? For so many people, myself included, it is a constant chase. Bills are real. Commitments are real. Money has relevance. The question is what goes on internally while it is being used.

I buy the same coffee most days. £5. A chat with the person behind the counter. The balance is fine. I do not bat an eyelid.

Then one ordinary morning the same coffee is £5.75.

That is enough. Enough for a piece of the mind to be given to the person who raised the price. Enough for a quieter oh. Enough to think twice before buying it, even when four of those coffees a week would not move the month in any way that matters. The thought alone, I don’t know if I’m having it, is a turmoil. Not bad. Not wrong. A disturbance.

If something that small can disturb, then financial comfort was never a settled place. It was an expectation. A relationship with a number that was supposed to stay where I had left it.

I have spent significant amounts, more than once. A car. A move. Then the mind says, now I build the pot again. Because I want security.

That security does not work. It does not matter what the number is.

The question underneath it is simpler, and rarely asked. What is the destination, with the money in the account? What am I actually looking for?

Financial security. Saving for a rainy day. Something to give the children a starting point. All of these are way off the drive itself. Even survival is a bypass if it is used to close the enquiry. I need money to live, so the unrest is natural, so the question can be left alone.

Without an anchor for the destination, turmoil arrives the moment something unexpected occurs. With clarity, the coffee moving from £5 to £5.75 would not create it. I would know whether it touches where I am headed. It does not. The choice to buy it or not would still be available. The disturbance would not.

There is another movement that follows the same root.

A person arrives, for a while, at something like comfort. What comes in, what goes out, what is already saved. The striving that built the nest loses its gravity. The figure they wanted was fifty thousand. They have three hundred. They are past it.

A restlessness gets up from the chair.

Stillness would mean facing what is arising around everything else. So the pot is put back to work. A bigger house. A nicer car. Another property. Before long the three hundred is a hundred, then fifty, then twenty. The loop returns. Save again. Build again.

This is not a moral. It is the avoidance of the gravitas dispersing. Of being with the fact that, without the drive toward the number, it is not clear who is driving. The identity of the chase is not something the mind volunteers to lose.

This holds because the destination was never known. What was followed was what had been told. Inherited. The destination did not get a turn.

So the comfort never arrives. Comfort would mean a consistent peace with the number. Take the number away and there are seven or eight other disturbances waiting. The money is then used to move the boundary. A bigger life. A school. A version of not having had this, and wanting it for them. The boundary moves. The unrest comes with it.

Money is not bad. It is not good. It is what it is.

The turmoil is the not knowing the destination.

Leave the house for the supermarket and a direction is chosen. Left or right. That knowing is what gets a person there. With money, the question is rarely asked, let alone sat with.

So it is not about being financially comfortable.

It is about being comfortable, regardless of finance. The exploration is internal. This is the destination. The basic needs I have committed to are met. There is enough freedom to come and go. That is an arrival, if it is true. Not a number.

Action remains. The coffee can still be questioned. The price can still be left. A different shop can still be chosen. None of that requires the turmoil. The turmoil comes from not knowing the destination.

What is the destination?

Sincere questions reveal an inner peace that no answer can touch.

The questions are here, if you want them.