Has It Gone Through You?

According to one of author Ernest Hemingway’s biographers, on the first day of each new year Hemingway gave away some of his most treasured possessions. And when people asked him why he did this, he would answer, “If I can give them away, then I own them. But if I can’t give them away, they own me.”

Psychiatrists and clinical psychologists have been telling us for a long time that it is the money aspect of their lives that troubled patients are most reluctant to reveal. They are willing to bare their souls about their work-life, about their home-life, about their sex-life, about their leisure-life, but not their economic life. This, it seems, is the last secret to unfold, the most painful to reveal. Why is that?

Is it because of the popular, but misguided belief that money empowers us to move into some kind of guaranteed future of our own making? Is it because we have been victimized by the terribly mistaken notion that…