The B-Word

Today being The Fifth Sunday, RS & Priesthood were combined for the third hour. The topic was budgeting, and at the core of the message was not the tired issue of wants and needs, but the principle of distinguishing between what we want NOW and what we REALLY want. Near the beginning, the speaker --a woman for whom my wife has a great deal of respect but whose life/lifestyle she's not terribly interested in emulating-- said, "I spoke about budgeting several months ago with a woman who recoiled in horror at the thought, exclaiming, 'A budget is like handcuffs. It keeps me from doing and getting what I want.'" A few minutes later, my wife said, "I don't like this very much." A few minutes after that, she left.

To be fair, she said she had to go relieve her sister who was at home with our baby. And I believe that this was a big reason for her departure.

Too bad she missed my comment in response to the speaker's invitation that we all think of what would need to be eliminated from our lives, under severe financial distress, for our family to subsist:

"Maybe the right approach isn't through subtraction, but through addition, starting with literally no material possessions. I suggest this, because as I started into the mental exercise, I soon realized that all of my 'subsistence' images --eating rice, putting on worn-out clothes from D.I., taking cold showers-- were all taking place inside of our current home. And even once I'd managed to picture us in a tent in the backyard, even the most blighted circumstances that I was able to conjure up still had us enjoying a standard of living surpassing that of probably 95% of the people who have ever lived on Earth. It would be hard to overemphasize the effects success and entitlement have had on our society, for which the 'goal posts' are forever bounding ahead, endlessly turning yesterday's wants into today's needs. As an interesting anecdote, I share what a member of our ward, a bankruptcy attorney, whose wife is here today, reported to me recently: During the process of declaring bankruptcy, a couple was vehemently defending its 'need' to keep its satellite TV subscription, which cost over $100 per month. Their case lay in their claim that it actually saved them money: 'If we didn't have satellite, think of how much we'd be spending on movies!' they protested. This may seem ridiculous, but we all have our own version of this couple's 'need' for satellite TV. So what, again, is subsistence? If our definition of subsistence is the definition of unfathomable luxury to literally billions of people, we may need to keep tinkering with that definition."

Fortunately for everyone, the meeting ended before I could actually make the comment.

Blessing Number 4

T-Rec interview, blessing,
BH on Fri: Pioneer trek ("manufactured moments"), 1 foot in door 1 out