海角大神

I don鈥檛 know what tomorrow holds. Neither do you.

Different people respond to that idea in drastically different ways.

Some people take it as a license to spend. They live wholly for the now and don鈥檛 worry much at all about the future. Today is the only moment that matters. If tomorrow comes, well, then their future self will deal with it.

Other people take it as motivation to save. They want to make sure that their future is as secure as they can make it, and they鈥檙e willing to sacrifice some excess now for that security later.

I鈥檝e lived on both sides of this equation, and I often think about them in terms of days and nights.

When I spent recklessly without considering the future, I would fill my days with purchases and expensive activities, but my nights were often filled with worry about what would come next.

When I moved into a saving mindset, I stopped filling my days with every single whim that came to mind, but the fear and worry in the night also went away.

Having experienced the two, I would far rather experience lower stress and fewer material things than days of pleasure and nights of worry.

It鈥檚 not really a matter of choosing to do without things I might otherwise want, either.

I鈥檝e come to discover that聽whenever I allow myself to have whatever I want, I fail to enjoy it as much.There鈥檚 no time to savor things when you鈥檙e quickly pressing yourself onwards to the next thing to enjoy.

I鈥檒l give you an example of what I mean.

In our downstairs closet, I have a box full of my favorite albums from my high school and college years. The box is loaded with CDs and cassettes by Pearl Jam, Devo, The Smashing Pumpkins, Lyle Lovett, and many other musicians who experienced their heyday in the 1980s and 1990s.

It would be easy to forget about that box and consign it completely to nostalgia, just digging it out every once in a great while to blow off the dust and have an hour of memories.

Why do that, though? These are albums that I聽love聽鈥� or at least聽loved. I can still sing along to almost every word on many of these albums.

Why are they sitting in dust? What鈥檚 the point?

I鈥檝e made a conscious effort over the last several months to listen to all of them again and just write down my thoughts on each one. This gave me the chance to savor all of these albums while also reflecting quite a lot on how I鈥檝e changed in some ways and not changed in others.

The cost of this whole experiment was a dollar or so worth of energy, and I鈥檝e easily found a few hundred hours of enjoyment from this project.

I didn鈥檛 feel the need to go buy anything new during the project. Spending money wasn鈥檛 a part of it.

It was all about savoring something wonderful and finding new ways to enjoy things that I already had.

The ability to immerse myself regularly in the things 鈥� possessions, sure, but also skills and thoughts and other things, too 鈥� I鈥檝e collected and cared deeply about during my life is a real blessing. It keeps me in touch with who I was, who I am, how I鈥檝e changed, and where I鈥檓 going.

This is one of the big hidden treasures of a frugal life.