Clarity for Teachers: Day 35
‘Clarity is more helpful than money. Don’t prioritise money at the expense of clarity.’
I remember a doctor with a brilliant mind and a world-class medical training who was working in her home country for a salary so low I thought I had misunderstood. She told me of an evening in Geneva with a group of young, expensively-educated Englishmen, when the conversation got onto the subject of money. They were all agreeing with each other that money had never been important to them, and that there was something distasteful about people who cared about money, and finally she exploded: of course you don’t care about money, you’ve never in your lives been short of it!
Because the first ways I earned it were as an itinerant street musician, and then as a door-to-door book salesman, there’s something queer about my relationship to money. I’ve never grown fully accustomed to the idea that there can be a fixed equation between work, time and pay. Getting paid a standard rate per hour feels like putting on a blindfold, cutting off a source of information about the worth of the work that I’m doing — whether or not it is working. To be clear, I’m not offering life advice here, nor advancing a political or economic or moral theory, only describing an experience. The one time I was given a salaried position for a couple of years, I had to wrestle with a sense of panic at the disconnect between the money that landed in my bank account each month and my sense of whether I was achieving anything in the role for which I was paid.
In Prague, in the summer of 2010, I sat down with a man who had founded an art magazine and publishing house. I’d just been in Budapest where I’d seen an exhibition of work by artists from the former Eastern Bloc, framed around the watershed years of 1989 and 2008. The curator’s thesis was that the global financial crisis had opened a space in which it became possible to question the economic assumptions that had dominated since the Iron Curtain came down, but it was also a reminder of how hard many of these countries had been hit. I asked him how their publishing house had coped. ‘Well,’ he said, blinking behind his glasses, ‘we don’t seem to sell as many of the €500 collectors’ editions as we did, but I have a feeling more people are reading the articles in the magazine. I remember there were these companies that shot up, seemingly from nowhere, and they don’t seem to be around anymore. No one ever bought a big house out of this company. No one ever bought a big car. When there was more money, we paid ourselves more — and when there was no money, everyone seemed to show up anyway to figure out how we could keep going.’
For me, that conversation disclosed a distinction that is hidden from a conventional economic lens: there are companies and organisations that would cease to exist, if the money stopped flowing through them, and then there are the ones where people would show up anyway to see if they can find a way to keep things going.
I’ve built a couple of organisations of that second kind. One thing it takes is a sense of fairness, a sense that people don’t feel foolish for caring about the work they are involved in. That means they know how the money works, how the decisions are made, and that what they earn is sufficient for them to live on. It can also mean a conversation I’ve had a few times, that goes a little like this: if our goal was simply to make money, then we wouldn’t do things the way we do them; we care too much to be that kind of efficient, and that means we can’t pay ourselves as much as we could earn if we took our skills elsewhere, but there’s a power in knowing this, because it means we are clear that we have a reason other than money for being here.
Now, there’s privilege in being in a position to choose to earn less than you could do elsewhere, when plenty of people are working three jobs and still struggle to make ends meet. There’s an echo, too, of the choice my doctor friend had made in coming back to work in her home country, when she could be earning vastly more elsewhere. Like she said, it’s easy to think you don’t care about money when you’ve never been short of it. Money is really helpful, and it can also cloud your ability to see things: it can mean you don’t have to pay attention to how the other person involved in a situation feels; it can mean you lose track of why the work you’re doing felt worthwhile in the first place. So don’t take money for granted, and don’t let it lead you into taking anything else for granted.
Västerås, 22 April, 2020
This is the thirty-fifth in a series of commentaries on ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’, Charlie Davies’s reworking of the 1000-year-old Buddhist text, ‘Advice from Atisha’s Heart’. I’m writing these as I take part in Clarity for Teachers, a course that Charlie is leading. You can find out more on the How To Be Clear website.
