I've been noticing how much of the fear people carry - indeed, how much I've carried — gets quietly pinned to money.
It seems like money is what keeps us fed, though it's obvious that you can't actually eat money.
Yes, money buys food, but only because a thousand quieter things happened first. Someone planted seeds in soil that took tens of thousand years to become soil. The soil contributed its nutrients, rain fell, and the sun did its slow work. Then someone harvested the produce and drove it through the night to a shelf near you.
The dollar just sits on top of all of that. Just a small paper symbol perched on an enormous living machine that has always been producing everything we need, without once checking anyone's bank balance.
If every dollar vanished tonight, the wheat would still come up tomorrow. The cows would still graze, the apples would still ripen on the branch, the rivers would still run to the sea. The richest man alive, handed a desert and no seeds, starves. A village with seeds and a little rain eats. Money never made the food. It only ever decided who got to reach it.
Which is why the fear around money is so much stronger than it needs to be. When people are frightened about money, we're afraid of being cut off from the flow of the thing that actually keeps us alive. But the flow was never made of numbers. It was here long before them, and it will be here long after.
And there's a strange relief in that, once you feel it rather than just agree with it. The supply you've been anxiously watching was never really the grocery store, or your clients, or the economy. Underneath all of it, quietly holding it up, is something far older and far more reliable. Life has been feeding people who couldn't see how it would possibly happen for as long as there have been people. It has never once needed worry to keep it fueled.