Dollars and nonsense

I was at Parkleigh buying a birthday card for a friend and I asked the cashier if they sold stamps. He said "No we don't sell stamps here...But today is free stamp day! So you get a free stamp with the purchase of any greeting card." And that right there is the overarching story of my life. What seem to be disappointments are really opportunities for something even better than what I was originally seeking. It happens all the time. Not always quite so instantaneously, but it happens. I know this and yet sometimes I still get stuck in the wants, the disappointments, the losses. Then I go in search of a stamp and I'm told no, you can't buy that here. Because it's free. And just like that Life has handed me both the tangible thing I'm seeking and the intangible lesson that I really need. Intellectually, I know I am surrounded by abundance. I have everything I need. Everything will be ok. Better than ok. Everything will be most excellent. I know it but I don't always feel it. Sometimes it is hard to reconcile emotion and logic. It is hard to shake the feeling that I am totally inept at everything and it's only a matter of time before it all comes crashing down.

I want to live in appreciation of the abundance, not in fear of scarcity. I want to enjoy where I am instead of worrying about how it could go wrong. I want to get the most out of my life now (while still setting myself up for a kick-ass future/early retirement/maximum impending awesomeness). Recently it's been occurring to me that the best way to do that might be by letting go of all my security blankets that I think are protecting me but are maybe suffocating me instead. The biggest of which was my savings account. I kept way more money than I needed in there because it made me feel like I had options, like whatever happened I would be fine. But it was earning a stupidly negligible 0.05%  interest, and I needed to release my little cash moneys out into the world so they could grow and make more cash money friends. So I transferred about 60% of the money to my non-retirement investment accounts, transferred about 30% to an online savings account with Ally Bank that pays 0.90% interest and I kept 10% of it in regular savings for future house projects or adventures or whatever happens next.

I also signed up for Mint.com so I can keep track of all my accounts in once place. It's convenient but it's a little depressing to be faced so blatantly with the calculation of my net worth. I think it is measuring all the wrong things. I don't want my net worth to be in dollars, I want it to be like 250 tiny unicorns and 3500 blueberry oatmeal cookies and 11,000 hugs and a million adventures and one American Bulldog and all the people.

Lyric of the moment: "This is how it works. You peer inside yourself. You take the things you like. And try to love the things you took. And then you take that love you made. And stick it into some, someone else's heart, pumping someone else's blood. And walking arm in arm, you hope it don't get harmed. But even if it does you'll just do it all again..."