|
When Tax Day looms, Melissa prints her credit card statement from the previous year, examines her year in spending, marveling at the document, at the organized way in which her very unorganized activities can be marshaled into some kind of order: the restaurant meals she paid for (the lobster rolls we ate outside, the dinner in D.C. with my friend from college); what she bought (so much for decreasing reliance on retail behemoths); how much she spent on travel (that trip was a year ago?), on gas, on charitable giving. |
|
She said she found herself reading this spending statement with interest. "It’s an emotionless album of debits to anyone else, but, like a logbook, it provoked a torrent of sensations in me. I wouldn’t go so far as to say reading my bank documents was fun, but it was enjoyable to look back on the year, to take stock. What I spent mapped in my memory to what I did and saw, where I went and whom I went with." |
|
She revels at the impact of the month to month look back of the detailed inventory of the year past. And now, here at the end of our first quarter of 2023, a logical place to "take pause" and "make Tax Day slightly less unpleasant by taking the occasion as one of personal reckoning with the year that was." I connected with her experience and I too have taken pause, to take stock and plan for the rest of 2023. Thank you Melissa. |