Reality v. Expectation
I have had a special opportunity the last couple of months. I was invited to help design the interior of a home. Design is not exactly my strongest suit, but nonetheless, it has been very fun. It’s a completely different creative outlet from anything else I work on – I was a practicing attorney for five years and now I run this business and spend my work hours writing, researching, and reviewing and discussing budgets. Designing a home seems to utilize an entirely different part of my brain. It gets creative juices flowing and it is energizing. It’s also really challenging. Pictures I find online that I use for inspiration should be just that, inspiration. They are from big-name designers with large budgets. When I work to replicate the design on our smaller budget, I am sometimes left feeling slightly disappointed because I end up with a different result than the inspiration design.
From this experience with the home design, I started thinking about how our reality and our expectations can so frequently differ. When I was a new lawyer, I imagined I could have a particular lifestyle. Let me tell you what I imagined: I would get weekly massages, I would travel for fun, I would eat at nice restaurants, I would have beautiful clothes. Now, let me tell you what my reality was: I got (occasional) $20 massage parlor foot rubs, my travel basically consisted of commuting 3 hours each way to work in a rural town, and eating out was often at a local pizza restaurant just for convenience. Sure, my initial imagination was a little rich but I thought that this was a normal lifestyle.
In my financial consulting practice, I’ve worked with clients who have had similar ideas of what lifestyles will look like when they’re finally earning a good living. When they input their expenses into a budget, there is rarely much available for spending on anything excess, let alone the amenities they imagined. The lifestyle that a lot of us imagine, and that we see perpetuated online and on TV and movies, is a lifestyle that so frequently doesn’t match most of our means.
As so often is true, the simplest answer to find satisfaction with our reality is to practice gratitude. When we can come from a place of gratitude for that which we have, we can appreciate where we are. From gratitude, we find beauty in those things we have – the things we are lucky enough to experience and those around us with whom we are lucky enough to share the experiences. I am grateful for this design experience, and I will get better as I do it. I am grateful for the lifestyle I have, even if it isn’t what I initially imagined.
One of the things that becoming mindful with money has helped me with is to get to this place of gratitude. My lifestyle dreams have changed and what I imagine now is much different, and much more fulfilling, for me, than I could have ever imagined before.