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Please think about your entire financial history. Try to remember all the worst things that have happened to you. Think back to how you felt—tense, afraid, paralyzed, angry, determined to prevail, whatever the emotions were at the time; there may have been several emotions at once. Remember the entire sequence of events. What happened before the crisis to set it off? What was the crisis itself like? How did the crisis resolve itself? What elements of it seemed crucial at the time, and do they still seem important now? How did it change your life? Write down the story if it will help you remember, or pull out any old notes or papers about it, to help you remember how you felt at the time. Here are a few questions to trigger your memories:
Did you ever not get a job you wanted badly?
Did you ever quit a job or get fired without knowing where your next penny was coming from?
i Have you ever lost a lot of money on an investment?
Have you ever had a business deal that you worked hard to put together fall to pieces at the last minute?
Have you ever had a relationship break up and, in addition to the grief you suffered, found yourself also very worried about money?
H Have you ever had a friendship end over money?
f When and why in your life were you the most frightened about money?
Now, let me ask you this: Have there come any gains from any of these losses? Didn’t any of your misfortunes turn out, over time, to be the best thing that could possibly have happened to you? Didn’t the gains come in ways you could never have predicted? You can turn the same exercise around and do it backward—review events that seemed to you at the time like lucky breaks—and I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that these lucky breaks sometimes brought with them problems or heartaches you never expected. Did that mean they weren’t really lucky? No—it means they were part of the cycle, and the cycle is natural. Gains and losses aren’t flukes, or curses; they are built in, like the doors and windows in a house; and they both have the capacity to bring us closer to the sort of life we long for.
In my own case, I know that my greatest periods of genuine growth came from the not-so-good times. What I got was more than just practical learning, though God knows there was plenty of that and it was very important. Still, it was the times of having nothing that taught me how much I really did have. They taught me to be grateful and to have faith in the natural rhythms of money and life. That inner knowing is the essence of the eighth step.