Depleting Finances, Fear & Harry Potter

I passed the 2-year anniversary of my graduation date a few days ago. This year JK Rowling delivered the commencement address – I read the transcript and safe to say, she was much more interesting than MY commencement day speaker, Jim Lehrer. The best excerpt I found was related to the tricky balance between one’s personal finances and the fear of depleting them (or perhaps more explicitly – the fear of failing) that keeps us from doing what we really want to do

“Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools... What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.”

Later, when she did indeed fail, she talked about “The Fringe Benefits of Failure,” the fact that:

“Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.”

I found that absolutely beautiful. It has me newly committed to getting back to writing. With the economy spiraling a bit, I'm sure many can testify to the fact that security in our finances has become increasingly valued above satisfaction with how we earn our money. Not saying that everyone should quit their jobs to write stories about fairy wizards, but it's good fodder for dinner table discussion at least...