Me Before Money

Me Before Money

The pulsing soreness shot through my legs as I gently ambled across the field to suddenly plop on an open grassy oasis underneath a gigantic brimming tree.  Bubbles of sweat bounced off my forehead, a remnant of a post-workout pickup game.  The body of a twenty year old purposefully beaten and battered on a random summer day on any college campus around the country.  My heart still raced as I rolled up the towel into a makeshift pillow, and closed my eyes for a few moments.  This was the me before money.

Thirty minutes later, I pull out a tattered paperback recently purchased for pennies at the campus used-book store.  My belly gave me a half an hour before it started to moan pitifully.  I left my gear under the tree, and jogged across the street to buy  a sandwich from the nearest market.

Returning, I noticed a an older bearded man sitting disheveledly with his back butted up against the shade giving colossus.  He was homeless.  I unwrapped the sandwich, held up the two halves as if in measurement, and then gave him the bigger portion.  We ate quietly without exchanging a single word.  Another lazy summer day in Ann Arbor.

Growing Up/Building a Career

Clearly, it wasn’t just me before money.  It was me before I  was a physician, a husband, a father, an adult.  There was a luxurious diffusion of purpose at that age.  I could wander the earth, using trial and error to figure out who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do with my life.

Becoming a physician, building a career, created a structural framework that left little space for creativity.  Summers at the gym were replaced with hours of classes and rotations.  The great novelists of the world played second fiddle to Gray’s Anatomy (the anatomy text) and Netter.

And slowly, I became a different person.  The crushing stress of medicine erected  impenetrable walls that took years and introspection to unbuild.  In what could only be described as ironic, charity and community bounced off a force field of feebly constructed self protectionism.

I became meaner, tougher, better able to react to the dirty little uncertainties that life had in store for me.  Yet I was unbearably weak and insufferable.  Behind the hypertrophied façade was me.

Hiding.

Domestic Bliss

Getting married, having children, and buying a house brought much joy and pride.  They defined a new me.  One, in some ways, better than the me before money.  But there certainly was even more diffusion of purpose.  Especially when it came to finances.

Being a physician transitioned from a passion, to a job, to a means to support a lifestyle.  While I still enjoyed the ins and outs of patient care, more of my emotional energy concentrated on how to make the economics work.  Opportunities were now not only weighed by innate curiosity and joy, but also with an eye on return on investment.

My time with my wife and children parsed by phone calls and meetings.  My attention diffused like sand being washed down the beach by an unexpectedly aggressive current.

A Chance To Go Back?

I can never go back to the me before money, the me before adulthood.  And I wouldn’t want to.  I wouldn’t trade my family, my house, or even my job for some alternate self-involved universe.

But financial independence has given me a unique opportunity to rebuild that which I was most enamored by in my former life.  I no longer have to make decisions based on economics, and can spend more time with my family.  I can cut out all those meddlesome parts of being a physician, and focus on that which enriches my life and the lives of my patients.

Sometimes in the midst of a busy day, I pull my car over in the middle of a tree-lined residential street.  I jump out, put my headphones on, and take a long ambling walk.  I clear my mind and allow the thoughts to cascade down my shoulders and bounce off my shoes toward the pavement.  Returning to the car, I grab a tattered library book from the glove compartment.

A brimming tree awaits.