ri¢h #3 : on my own terms

My old definition of being rich was I am able to go running outside in the light of day any day in the dead of winter.
   So how did this fail me when Roscivs died? Technically, I could still do that (at least for the first winter).

When I was a newly-married college student, I was dirt poor. If you look just at $ in the bank vs my expenses, I was perhaps the poorest I've ever been.
   But I was student poor. That's not poor poor. I didn't even feel poor. I didn't even know what it was like to feel poor. I felt like I didn't have a lot of money, but that's not the same. I wasn't expecting it to get worse; I wasn't expecting it to stay the same; I was expecting it to get better. When you're poor poor, that expectation is absent.

Last year my SIL Thea said that "Leon's poor". Bjorn said no, "he's not poor. His earning potential is heavily weighted toward the future."
   A reasonable expectation of future earnings is an important sort of rich. This has to do with how I felt poor when Roscivs died. I had a lot of expenses, with no reasonable expectation of future earnings. It got worse every day.

Now it's getting better all the time.


My old definition belonged to a universe that ceased to exist when Roscivs died. Furthermore, it had a lot of non-monetary contours mixed in with its monetary ones. There's the rub when it comes to me and riches. To me, for me, rich is about outcomes way more than it is about income.
   {What about to me, for others?}
   My current definition (I have the funds I need to pursue and support my health) has a lot of the same elements as my old one: outside time, free time, health [running], security in times of scarcity [sun in winter]. It's intertwined with (if not predicated on) Bjorn's love and support.

(I tried to make it one that wouldn't fall apart like the last one did, but that just can't be helped. When everything falls apart everything falls apart.)

So. Ok. Health funds are enough for me to be rich. I went out of my way to make my new definition money-focused. I thought it to be an important part of the exercise. But when it comes down to it I just can't seem to conceive of me feeling rich without a bright future filled with health and family. My semantic wobbling is unveiled: "rich" can involve a nebulous "happiness" as much as "money".
   I've been trying since the outset of this li'l blog series to clarify my terms. Clear terms are, after all, linguistic manifestations of clear thoughts. I don't know how successful I've been (uh oh?), but the exploration has gotten me closer to clear. If it's all still murky, at least it's an examined murkiness! 
   It would be less sloppy if I consistently used one term (say, "rich") to mean being rich (having money) and another term (say, "wealth") to mean feeling rich. And not having money ("poverty"?) and feeling poor ("destitute"?) could use their own terms too. Maybe I'll try using those clarified terms now.

I'm about to get less rich and more wealthy. I'm closing my studio; I'm going to stop teaching. It's fair call it retirement. What I say, though, is that I'm trading some income for some outcomes.