Tag: taxes

Forests vs Trees

I like sharing the work of insightful writers here. I usually share their work because I have learned something. I have taken away from someone else’s writing something that I need to practice and focus on.

So I share the wisdom of Avery Hart today. She says “out loud” what I am frequently guilty of. I spend so much time worrying about small things, I can miss out on the big things.

My priorities can go badly out of focus. While trying to set up a workable bookkeeping system for daily expenses, I let my taxes go unfiled. I scurry around trying to find every possible deduction and then pay a penalty because my taxes are filed late.

This is a real and nagging real-world example in my life. I have always struggled with accounting and financial management. Not that I am that bad at it, per se, but I could do a better job. I am solvent and financially comfortable. I should start acting it.

My takeaway from Avery Hart’s insightful piece is that maybe I should just get the damned returns in. The weight of carrying the task of filing them corrodes my spirit. As it is such a stumbling block and bugbear in my life, that sure sounds to me as if there is something fundamental there to investigate.

Avery Hart puts it this way. She’s talking about spiritual growth. And what else is our life purpose if not that as its fundamental underpinning?

Have you ever heard the saying “missing the forest for the trees”? It may be a cliché at this point, but I feel like this is something we all do on occasion. It’s easy to get so caught up in the smaller things to the point that we completely forget to attend to the big important things. This is especially true in our spiritual and emotional life. After all, what even are the big things when it comes to spirituality and emotions? How are you supposed to make sure that you’re getting the big things right if you don’t even know what those big things are? 

I see far too many people focusing all of their time and attention on tiny details while the greater foundation of their spiritual life is crumbling, and I don’t want this to happen to you. Today we’re going to talk about why this happens, how you can recognize if it’s happening in your spiritual life, and what you can do about it. 
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Do You Get Caught Up In The Small Details?

Have you ever spent so much time trying to pick a guided meditation that you end up not having enough time left to meditate at all? Or maybe you’ve taken the time to set up the perfect altar and get every crystal and candle in exactly the right place, only to realize you have no idea what to do at this altar. Maybe it’s even something simple, like focusing too much on trying to pick out the exact right crystal to wear that day and completely missing the fact that you’re bulldozing yourself in every situation you run into. Whatever it may be, it’s all too easy to fall into this trap of focusing on the minutia to the point that we start missing how much we are letting the big stuff slip. 

There are about a million examples of how we can get our priorities mixed up in this way. 

You can see it in the yogi who meditates excessively even while their relationships are crumbling around them. 

It’s trying to learn every esoteric skill and psychic ability out there while completely ignoring your real life. 

It’s striving to create a picture-perfect image of yourself as some spiritually enlightened being while paying no mind to the way that this cuts you off from the people around you. 

Getting caught up in these less-than-important details isn’t your fault. It happens to all of us on occasion. The problem is simply that we don’t know how to recognize what is truly important and what is a distraction. There is one easy way to begin to decipher the important things from the not-so-important things. 

Spirituality, at its core, is meant to improve your life. It’s not meant to make you feel better or to distract you from your life, it’s meant to make your actual, mundane, day-to-day life better in very real, observable ways. If your spiritual practices are not supporting this basic goal, then you are focusing on the wrong things. 

What’s more important, learning astral travel or doing inner child work? Reading tarot cards or meditating? Working with crystals or communing with your ancestors? 

The answer is that it depends on your intention in pursuing each of these practices. The practices themselves are not necessarily better or worse, it’s what you intend to do with them that matters. Inner child work may seem more important than astral travel at first blush. I mean, what do you actually gain through astral travel? But astral travel can be used to do deep shadow work and at a certain point, inner child work can become a distraction from taking real action in your life. In contrast, astral travel can be used as an escape to experience a fantasy reality while inner child work can be used to heal the beliefs and patterns of behavior that are creating problems in your relationships. 

It’s not about what you do, it’s about how you do it and why you’re doing it. 

This, unfortunately, means that there is no easy answer to whether you are really focusing on the important things. I can’t tell you which of your practices are important and which are distractions. You have to evaluate for yourself what your intentions are in every practice that you do and how these practices actually benefit your life. Does your meditation practice help with your anxiety, or are you simply using it as a way to feel better about yourself as a more spiritual person? Are you using your tarot cards to evaluate your life direction and gain real insight or are you using them to avoid making decisions and shunning responsibility off onto the universe or some other nebulous power? 

This honesty is one of the greatest gifts that you can give yourself. It’s one of the few things that will accelerate your spiritual growth exponentially.
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Off-Putting

Today’s writing prompt: What have you been putting off doing? Why?

Taxes.

I know I am not alone in this. The prompt is timely as I am remiss in providing my accountant with all of the necessary records and statements to get the verdammtes things finished.

I believe my aversion to taxes is connected to other money-based fears I have.

My father was a miser. In retrospect, I would call it an identifiable disorder. I know his miserliness emerged from childhood trauma. In his childhood, he experienced severe emotional and also financial lack (though not wildly different than others of his generation).

His miserliness in coin and spirit defined him and his life.

By contrast, my mother was exactly opposite. She freely and frequently spent money she didn’t have. She would not concede that there would be a lack of anything in her life – no matter what reality showed her.

In both parents, money issues came from dysfunctional childhoods and plagued them to their grave. In fact, their money management styles only became more deeply entrenched as they grew older.

My father exhibited visible pain when his caregiver selected a package of ham only slightly more expensive than the ham offered at the lowest price. She switched them out and bought the lower priced (and lower quality) ham. His relief was palpable.

For awhile, he ran an ice cream parlor. That was a sweet semi-hobby (pun intended) my father took on in retirement. For his grandkids, it certainly was. But Dad drove his employees up the wall. He hung around the shop all day and would not stockpile perishable items, like bananas.

When someone came in and ordered a banana split, Dad would get in is car, trundle down to the supermarket ten minutes away to buy one. One banana. I can’t imagine his strategy was all that great for attracting repeat business when a customer had to wait 20-30 minutes for an ice cream treat. I can’t imagine any money he saved by not stockpiling made up the cost of his gas.

My mother was completely opposite. A bit of a scofflaw if I’m honest. When the banks came after her in her dotage for unpaid loans, she actually took them to court to argue that she hadn’t made payments on the loans because the banks miscalculated the interest.

I can’t imagine the legal logic she deployed to make that argument. I never saw the argument written down on paper. I’m not she ever did write it down or would have dared. I only know Mom lost that case to the banks. She often said, “The banks never lose.” She knew that going in.

I know people who actually do their taxes themselves, every year and submit them on time. I do not understand those people.

Even with hired help to get the dreaded taxes done, my neurosis hangs on. I am a procrastinator extraordinaire when it comes to tackling my taxes. Or I go the opposite way. I binge produce my statements only to have the whole process slow and eventually shut down because I missed sending one statement in the annual batch.

It is an immaturity to be sure. It is also clearly a neurosis. A crazy mix of my mother and father’s belief and treatment of money. I save every receipt and invoice and bank statement like Gollum holding on to his “Precioussssss.” Unlike Gollum, I don’t get the same emotional or psychological satisfaction from grasping and holding on to fading pieces of paper.

During my recent hoard unload, it was beyond satisfying (and embarrassing) to throw out batches of receipts and paper clutter I had been hanging on to for decades. It is important to mention that not once in all those years of hoarding receipts in case of a tax audit, did I ever have to face one.

Yet there is a teeny-tiny voice inside that says if you start throwing away receipts now, you just KNOW the tax department is going to come for you. Maybe. Maybe not.

I only know it seems like a silly (but essential) habit of receipt hoarding I have had my whole adult life.

So there. I am making my fears known and facing the buggery tax returns. I’ve done that before and it is usually enough to get me partway through the backlog. I need to do it again. Ad infinitum it would seem. Or at least annually.

So guess what I’m doing today? Honest? Likely anything but taxes unless the money gods conspire to inspire me. Sigh.