Rich and Broke at the Same Time

Twenty years in the fog, and the view I couldn’t imagine turned out to be home…

Last night, Kim, Jenny, and I started watching a movie the three of us had first seen about twenty years ago, Little Miss Sunshine.

The first time we saw it, we were broke.

Not the temporary, “things are tight this month” kind of broke. The kind that had been hanging around for the better part of a decade, long enough that it had stopped feeling like a season and started feeling like an address. And the hard part was never the present moment. It was the math of the future. When you live a certain way long enough, you start to quietly believe that’s the way the rest of it goes.

Kim hated that movie. Not because it was a bad movie, because it hit too close to home. The family in it is crammed into a beat-up van that keeps breaking down, the kind you have to push just to get it rolling, with a horn that won’t quit honking. Kim could barely sit through it. It pulled her straight back to a night of our own, the time we ran out of gas and I had to climb out and push our van off a dangerous stretch of highway myself. I weighed four hundred pounds then.

That was our life. Disassembled…

And that’s the same reason the movie has stayed with me for twenty years… it was too relatable..

There’s a dad in that film running around with a nine-step motivational program, swearing he’s about to turn it all around, and not turning anything around. That was me. There’s a wife who has heard one too many of his promises and has quietly run out of road for them. There was a version of that in our house, too. And there’s a little girl with her whole heart set on winning a pageant.

That was Jenny, not in 2006, when we first watched it; she was older by then. But picture her a few years earlier, around twelve, and that little girl on the screen was Jenny.

Here’s a detail the movie didn’t know it was telling on us about… the whole back half is a frantic, against-the-clock drive to get the little girl to the contest on time. Years before we ever saw the film, Kim and I had loaded Jenny into a car and driven her from New Jersey to Florida so she could sing on Star Search, and we made it with about a minute to spare. Same mad dash. Same “are we going to make it.” We’d already lived the climax before we ever watched it.

And there’s a silent one in that movie, too, the older brother, the one who’s stopped speaking. He’s taken a kind of vow, counting down the days until he can get out, saying everything by saying nothing. We had our own silent one. Matthew, Jenny’s younger brother. His was a different kind of quiet, though. Not a vow. Not a protest. It was the silence of a boy who loved us, who saw exactly how hard things were and felt every bit of it, and who learned young that when you can’t fix what’s hurting the people you love, sometimes you just go quiet.

Last night, Kim went to bed before it was over. I almost did too. I was dozing on the couch, and for some reason I still can’t fully explain, I stayed up.

I’m so glad I did.

Because Jenny and I ended up watching the end of the movie together. The family’s chaotic sprint to the hotel where the pageant is held. The ramps, the roads, the parking lots, that stretch of coastline.

And Jenny looked up and said, “Look that’s where we live!”

I looked. And the two of us just sat there, stunned.

The hotel in that movie. The ramps. The roads. The pier. It’s the view we look out on every single morning now, from a third-floor balcony, with the Pacific Ocean in front of us and the Ventura Pier off to the side.

In 2006, when we first watched that film and felt it land a little too close, the place we now call home wasn’t even an idea in our heads. It hadn’t even been built yet. And it was a full four years before Jenny and I would walk onto The Biggest Loser.

We had no clue. Not a flicker.

We were sitting in the fog.

Jim Collins has a name for this, and he put it in his book, What to Make of a Life.

He says life hands all of us cliffs. Events big enough to change everything, and that after a cliff comes fog.

A long stretch of not knowing.

Disorientation.

Sometimes a quiet loss of who you thought you were.

And here’s the part that stopped me cold, the fog isn’t a failure.

It’s a passage.

It can last months, or years, or a decade, and the real danger isn’t the fog itself.

It’s panicking and leaping just to get out of it, which usually only walks you off the next cliff.

We were in the fog for a long time. And this is the strange, two-things-at-once truth I keep coming back to after warching the movie twenty years later…

We were broke. And we were rich.

Both. At the same time.

We were broke, in the way a bank statement measures broke, that part was real, and I’m not going to pretty it up.

And we were rich in a way no statement has a column for.

Because underneath all of it, we had just enough evidence from our own lives to keep believing that if we kept moving forward, we’d figure it out.

Broke was a number. But it was never going to break us.

You can be rich and broke at the same time. And, this is the one most people miss. You can be rich by every number the world keeps score with, and still be broke in the places that you decide how your life actually feels.

Same fog. Two completely different ways to live through it.

Now here’s the part I didn’t see twenty years ago, and honestly couldn’t have.

What I was missing back then wasn’t a map. It wasn’t a lucky break or a better plan. What I was missing was that I never upgraded the identity of the person walking through the fog. I kept waiting for the circumstances to change so I could finally become someone new, when the whole thing actually works the other way around.

Collins has a word for the thing in us that a cliff can finally bring to the surface.

He calls it being encoded.

The role you were quietly built for all along, sometimes revealed only when life knocks you sideways. The funny thing is, I wrote that exact word in my own journal just a few mornings ago, describing how I now show up to write.

Encoded.

I’d been using his word before I’d ever read his book.

I think that’s the evidence. I think I was always encoded for this. I just spent a long time waiting in the fog instead of becoming the guide who could walk people through it.

Which brings me to the real thing I’ve been carrying all these years, and it isn’t weight.

It’s waiting…

Waiting is the heaviest thing I’ve ever hauled around. Heavier than any number on any scale. And every real chapter of my life seems to have started the moment I finally set it down and moved before I felt ready.

So today I’m not standing on that balcony thinking Ventura, or somewhere better.

I’m thinking Ventura, and something better.

And, not or.

This life, and more of it.

The fog lifts when you stop waiting for it to lift and start becoming the person who can see in it.

Remember the silent one?

Matthew grew up. And the quiet that began as a boy not knowing what to do with his hurt slowly turned into distance. He went off to college and then mostly stayed gone, summers on campus, semesters abroad. And I want to be careful here, because this part matters to me more than almost anything else in this story.

He didn’t stay away because of where we were or what we didn’t have. He stayed away because he loved us. Watching people you love be stuck, really stuck, stuck in their own way, and not being able to do a single thing about it is one of the heaviest things a young person can carry. He tried to help. He did what he could. And there’s only so much a kid can do. So a little distance became the kindest thing he knew how to give himself. It was never about the money. It was about love that didn’t have anywhere to put itself.

Here’s what the fog could never have told me back then.

This coming Monday morning, Matthew flies in from Chicago to LAX. Kim, Jenny, Toby, and I will all be there to meet him, and from the curb we’re pointing the car (not a van) toward Palm Springs for a few days as a family. The last family trip like this one was Iceland when Matthew treated us all to such an amazing adventure.

The boy who once had to keep his distance now can’t get back to us fast enough. He loves this place. He comes home every chance he gets. The quiet broke many years ago, not because we finally had money, but because the thing he’d wanted all along was never money in the first place. It was this. All of us together, seasoned and grateful to all be out of the fog…

We left broke along time… but not the memory of it.

And the truth I can finally read clearly is that we were always rich, we just couldn’t make out the statement through the fog. The way we see this whole life unfolding from here?

Richer still…

Twenty years ago, the ending of that movie was already a map to my front door.

I just couldn’t read it yet.

So let me hand you the question I can’t stop asking myself.

Where in your life are you broke and rich at the very same time?

What’s the number telling you you’re behind, the bank balance, the scale, the title that hasn’t come yet, and what’s the quieter evidence, the kind no statement has a column for, that says you’ve been rich the whole way through and just couldn’t read it through the fog?

Because here’s what I’d put money on… the fog you’re standing in right now is hiding a view.

You can’t see it yet.

And you don’t find out what’s out there by waiting for it to clear.

You find out by becoming the person who can walk through it…

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