You Bet Your Life
Member David Bright does a splendid presentation on the subject of Multi-Dimensional Wealth. At the center of his talk is the illustration, real or imagined, of Da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man, the one depicting a man in two superimposed positions with his arms and legs apart and inscribed in a circle and square. Think of wealth, David explains, in terms of the body’s extremities, the man’s two legs, two arms, and then the head.
In essence, starting with the arms and legs, each representing one of four aspects of wealth:
Material: probably the first thought that comes to mind when the subject is wealth, starting with one’s basic financial security, maybe then encompassing desire as wants eclipse needs, even to the extent of a life defined by ego-fuelled wretched excess;
Health: often overlooked as mere cliche’ until it’s lost or severely compromised when it takes center stage;
Relationships: the degree and types may vary and, while normally thought of in terms of family and friends, may also extend beyond the individual, to encompass other sorts of connections, even "attachments,"spiritual and otherwise;
Time: quick, David might ask, roughly how many hours do you think you have left on earth?; the wildly missed estimates (spoiler: 8,760 hrs/yr) speak volumes about the lack of regard for this element as a form of wealth, as does the phrase "killing time" when the fact of the matter is that it’s time that’s killing us.
Our entire life narrative is wrapped around such trade-offs, whether measured in terms of the instant or an entire life. We might examine our own philosophy when it comes to wealth balance, even as we recognize it is how we act that speaks so much louder louder than what we might articulate.
In any event, the wealth calculus must certainly change with life stages. Easy to say now (in later life) that we wish we'd spent "less time at the office," that the adrenaline rush from that death-defying jackass stunt of our youth was really worth the risk, that Death would be suitably impressed by the big fat balance sheet we’d accumulated.
All this then brings to mind the fifth component, Wisdom, represented by the head and the subject of our focus article, a short story by Anton Chekhov in 1889 (click The Bet). A Russian dinner-party conversation about the relative punitive effects of life imprisonment versus capital punishment gives rise to a bet between the host and a guest. If the guest can voluntarily endure fifteen years of solitary confinement, the host will pay him a great fortune. The experiment begins.
In this veritable Faustian bargain, the guest ultimately sacrifices those four above-mentioned wealth components (material; health; relationships (with others); time) in exchange for fifteen years in total isolation accompanied only by access to all the written wisdom, as he writes near the end of his isolation, “Your books have given me wisdom. All that the unresting thought of man has created in the ages is compressed into a small compass in my brain. I know I am wiser than all of you.”
His conclusions? Better buckle up.