How many of us have played the game Monopoly as kids? I used to play with my brothers and sister and they always kicked my butt. The name of the game was to acquire but I was a saver, not a spender. One summer afternoon my brother Doug explained to me that “in order to win I had to learn to play the game”. This was confusing to me because I was following the rules, pushing the little metal car around the board; of course I knew how to play the game. “No,” Doug said, “You have to stop saving your paper money on the side and spend it. You have to buy up everything you can. You have to acquire more than anyone else and you have to be greedy. That’s how the game is played and by getting more is the only way you’re going to win.”
At seven years old this made a sort of distorted sense. At 43 I understand the rules and objective of the board game but it makes no sense to me as it applies to reality. I did finally learn to play the game. I became ruthless and greedy, perfected my acquisition strategy by buying up everything I could get my hands on, effectively kicking my siblings to the cardboard curb. But after I defeated the other players and the game was over, all that wonderful multicolored money, all those coveted properties and condos went back into the box. All those pretend possessions weren’t really mine to begin with. Looking back I can see the lesson in that game.
We spend our lives focused on what we don’t have, not on what’s right in front of us. As a society we’ve bought into the game; we scramble to obtain regardless of who we trample in the process. We build oversized homes with oversized closets in which we stuff all our possessions yet we feel we must still get more. Our material possessions become our personal identity. Society has taught us that greed and acquisition, taking whatever we want from whomever we want, our portfolios and fancy cars – this how life is to be lived. But everything we gather, all those things we clutch and horde will eventually go back into the box. In the end we will lose it all because we can’t take them with us.
When the thrill of the acquisition wears off, and it will wear off, then what? Where has the road of greed, paved on the backs of the less fortunate, brought you? Will you still remember what really matters?
Back in the spring of 2005 my family lost our home to a fire. We lost everything. Nobody could understand why I wasn’t falling apart, marveled at my outlook when I explained to them that though we had lost everything, we hadn’t really lost anything. Our family survived this tragedy because we had each other.
A community of strangers stepped forward to support my family at this time and I was blown away by their generosity. Up until that point I’d never given myself a chance to get to know this community of strangers. One gentleman wrote us a check for $5. When I share this experience, when I get to the part about the $5 check, I see the question in people’s eyes: ‘what is $5 going to help?’ I then go on to explain that this man could have easily not given us anything. I imagined that he needed that $5 far more than we did but he gave it away to us. It was that moment that made me decide to let go of my very lucrative private practice in Tualatin and relocate the Living Spirit Healing Center to my new hometown, because I discovered in this small, backwoods town that people care and I wanted to care back.
We’re in this game, the human experience, together but the rules have changed. Regardless of our differing outlooks, beliefs, sexual orientations and political leanings, the new rules to the game are simple: we must strive to see ourselves in each other. Nothing separates me from you, from that guy down the road, or the homeless man living under the bridge. Where we once fought to acquire, now we must fight to survive; we must take care of each other. This is the new human experience, poised on the threshold of an advancing Golden Age. We can do this America; we can survive the coming global and economic tides because we have each other.
We can. We will. We must.
