Your Life Account

Life gets richer for those that know how to enrich it. Those riches have lit­tle or noth­ing at all to do with money. Life qual­ity is a sep­a­rate mea­sure. It is also an art form. In an overly mate­r­ial world, it is the pos­ses­sion of a few along the fringes that have not for­got­ten how to live. Some of them are wealthy and some are poor, but they are both rich.

Life-wealth has to do with a prac­ticed aware­ness. If you are the sort of per­son that stops to look at clouds or close your eyes for a moment to sense a gen­tle breeze on your face, you may be one of those peo­ple. The free riches of life are all around us. They are not forced on us. We have to reach out our expe­ri­en­tial “hands” (eyes, ears, and imag­i­na­tion) to receive them.

The ten-thousandth time you look at the sky, you notice that the habit has built a multi-layered mem­ory. It is an expe­ri­ence that is a com­pos­ite of every time you have ever taken a moment to look at the sky. The sym­bol has acquired depth. It touches a thou­sand feel­ings in an instant. There is an inter­ac­tion that takes place that is the equiv­a­lent of open­ing a pri­vate vault full of jew­els. We carry this wealth with­out hav­ing a sin­gle ounce of any­thing in our pock­ets and by being obliv­i­ous to our bank balance.

These mem­o­ries are not always joy­ful. The sad and the bit­ter­sweet also add to the enrich­ing mix. The moment that con­nects to all such moments is eter­nal in nature. Some­times it is trig­gered by aro­mas that are all too com­mon (my favorite is spent jet fuel). I like paint fumes, car exhaust in win­ter, pine trees, alfalfa, freshly picked cot­ton, cof­fee, bacon, snow, and salt-sea air. Can­dle shops are high on my list too. New car­pet or a dust storm trig­ger reflec­tions that take me on a thou­sand journeys.

Walk­ing into a cathe­dral means a lot more if you have stud­ied church his­tory or art. If you have devel­oped a sense of space — an aware­ness of any great place (build­ing or canyon) that you have ever been — then you know what I mean. It isn’t just the air around you; it is the mes­sage of the Cre­ator or cre­ators of that par­tic­u­lar space. Every room in your dreams is an amal­gam of every room in which you have ever been.

You can go through this day feel­ing rich or poor. The choice is yours. Ignore your bank account and fill your life account - for the life account is the one that you will take with you on your eter­nal jour­ney. The other is just num­bers on paper. The num­bers go up or down. They are merely a score­card kept by insti­tu­tions — espe­cially gov­ern­ments want­ing their cut. Your life account can never be stolen from you. Jesus called it “trea­sures in heaven” — a bit intan­gi­ble, but more real in the long run than the gold at Fort Knox.