I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Wealth, I write about money management, retirement, estate, and long-term care planning.
I’m a naturally frugal person and though I occasionally allow myself a little indulgence, I mostly keep tight reins on my spending. I haven’t found that spending more reliably brings more happiness and satisfaction.
I’m not too big on travel, having traveled and moved around a lot as a younger adult. I’ve visited the places I want to visit. I’m a natural homebody, and my home is already in great shape so doesn’t need a fancy renovation or new furniture to serve as my sanctuary and my studio.
This past week I flirted with the idea of applying for full-time work after seeing a job opportunity that appealed to me. I thought about what it would be like to feel the flow of money coming in again rather than living off my savings and investments. I remembered that when I did work, I often spent more money just because I could, and because it helped distract from the tedium and upsets that full-time work brought to my life.
I’ve also thought at times that I should find ways to sell my art on a regular basis or turn my writing into an income stream, for example by selling subscriptions to a premium newsletter.
What would I get out of having more money?
- More protection against the unpredictable costs of aging
- More freedom to help my children with big expenditures
- Evidence of the value of my writing and artmaking
- More money to create art (but less time)
The first one is probably the one I think about most, and one that worries most retirees.
The last one is interesting and illuminating. When I went on an art retreat in Sausalito a couple years ago I met a woman in her seventies who was successful in selling her abstract acrylic paintings. She showed her work in a cooperative gallery she belonged to. She had been an interior decorator for many years, so she knew what kind of artworks would look good as decor. Her work uses sophisticated color combinations and exuberant markmaking.
She told me, “I make enough to be able to go to any art retreat I want to. I make enough to be able to pay for my supplies and more.”
She inspired me to think about the cycle of artmaking in a different way. Do I do it to make money, to earn kudos?
No. I do it because I can’t help myself. I do it to inspire other people. I do it to say something.
Fortunately I don’t need to make money from my art to be able to continue. My accumulated wealth funds it.
So maybe that’s what wealth is for, for me. To be able to create.
creations as gifts
Creating things can be a gift to the world even if no one pays for your work or hangs it on their walls.
Last Christmas, I made paintings of the extended family’s pets as actual gifts. But creative output doesn’t always move as obvious gifts. Sometimes the movement of gifts is more subtle.
My older daughter quit her software engineering job to focus her time and mind on creative writing. She cited my life as an example, since I have, throughout it, taken regular breaks from corporate tech employment to spend my energy on creative efforts like writing or painting. That is a gift I gave her: the gift of freedom to choose. The gift of knowing she could make such a choice.
In The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, Lewis Hyde writes:
Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing. [emphasis mine]
I am not saying that my daughter was brought to the place where she is by “the work of a master.” I am no master. I am saying she was “converted to art by art itself.” She saw me writing as a young mother, writing out my struggles, writing out the reality of motherhood, sharing my joys. Much more recently, she saw me laboriously developing my skills as an abstract artist, hanging up my early efforts, small and crude though they were, and she saw my progress as the works became bigger, bolder, and more clearly mine. She saw art emerge, and an artist alongside.
She “inhaled the memory” of my work as a writer an artist, just as I did the same from my maternal grandmother, who was an accomplished oil painter and watercolorist.
Right now, my wealth allows me to make art, and my art allows me to connect with others and inspire them, even as they inspire me.