The Counter-Intuitive Cucumber

Someone recently called me ‘counter-intuitive’. Which I took as a complement, although I’m not sure that it was intended as such. And of course, one of the most inappropriate things to do when Connect is dedicating an edition to green money and ethical investment – on which I am specialist – would be to use this column to write about something completely different. So read on. . .
It’s really because I recently ran the workshop Making Friends With Money and realised that I’d never written anything about it. I’ve been doing it since 1993 in locations all over the country. And it’s (if I say so myself) pretty damn’ good. But the name seems to frighten people off. Somebody at the last session apologised on the way in because she hadn’t brought a calculator. She assumed – as so many people seem to – that a relationship with money must be about accounting. As if. Do I look like an accountant? Do I write like one? Do I sound like one? Well, OK, I might do. But only occasionally.
The thing is, accountancy and things of that nature are about treating money as though it’s physical. And of course, it isn’t. I mean yes, it has a manifestation in the form of notes and coins, but you aren’t really having a relationship with those. Anyway, anything that you might want to make friends with has to be something with which you can establish a rapport. Dented old bits of metal just don’t do it.
So what are you having a relationship with when it comes to money? There is an oriental metaphor which I rather like. It suggests that there are basically two types of force in the universe: heaven energy and earth energy. Heaven energy is things like lightning – intrinsically shocking and unpredictable, which have no physical manifestation and therefore can’t be held, measured or divided. By contrast, earth energy takes the form of stuff like cucumbers. They are. . . well, dull. Useful, yes. Attractive in a way. But boring, banal. Commonplace and conventional. And they exist.
So is money an earth energy or a heaven energy? The clue is in whether you can put it in a wheelbarrow. Yes, it has a physical manifestation, which is inherently mundane. But is that what money’s actually about? Is it really predictable? Can the underlying energy be grasped or analysed? Is it a life-force or just a piece of bunkum?
Well, of course it’s an illusion. In this story, money is a heaven energy masquerading as an earth energy. Which it does very effectively.
The result is that people assume that money can be dealt with on a humdrum level. With calculators, pencils and pieces of paper. With analytical tools and assumptions that if something has happened in the past, it will inevitably happen again in the future. It’s just a matter of when.
Oh no. No no no no no.
Money is a manifestation of the life force. And when you are looking to make friends with it, you’re not chatting up a doughnut. You’re not trying to be in relationship with a clod. You’re talking to the divine. And the issue there is that what gets in the way is us. It’s the practices which we have developed over the years to stay safe and predict the future. It’s the belief patterns and habits that we hang on to with all our might so that we know who we are. Yes, cucumbers.
Let me give you an example from the workshop. You see, one of the things that human beings frequently do is to establish an underlying belief about ourselves or the world. It’s a classic piece of pattern recognition, something which allows us to feel perversely safe because we think we have recognised an absolute underlying truth about reality.
A classic example is ‘there isn’t enough’. And this won’t just touch on money, it’ll manifest in every aspect of our lives. So there won’t be enough of anything. Enough time, enough love, enough food. . . So what happens is that we develop strategies to cope. Somebody who thinks there isn’t enough time will be habitually late. Or they’ll over-compensate and be habitually early. Or infuriatingly on time. Or simply not care. But all these are reactions to a fundamental, underlying belief. That there isn’t enough.
The thing is that these become recognised as personality traits. Sometimes attractive, sometimes exasperating, but simply aspects of that person’s identity. And as human beings are rather conformist, we tend to reinforce things which others notice in us. So rather than recognising that we are someone who’s got a neurotic issue about time, we’ll often play up to this expectation and become ‘good old Jack who’s always late’.
But with money, it’s much more of a survival issue. And counterintuitively, this means that it’s easier to get at the underlying belief. Because it’s so important, it’s easier to change. It’s not just about identity, it’s about our deep, underlying truth. Not just cucumbers themselves, but the force that makes them wiggle and dance and gyrate in their own world. The energy that makes radishes boogie in the dark hours and hedgehogs travel down to the coast to tell each other jokes and slap their fi sts as planets bounce off each other in the night sky. You know, that dynamic. Yes, that one.
Now it’s clear that an article like this will make some readers shudder at the idea of even contemplating a workshop like that. But not you, of course. The next one in Exeter is scheduled for 27th May. And we’re also running it in London, Newcastle, Paris and probably Jersey this year. It’s quite counter-intuitive. Come along. You might like it.