Friday morning did not start well. Determined to pack a lunch, Zoey had tried her hand at cooking something, a simple Mediterranean recipe out of a column from her own magazine. Her efforts had yielded nothing but some inedible charred veggies and a foul mood that was worsening by the minute.
During the night she’d had a truly horrible dream: the treadmill nightmare again, only this time the treadmill was suspended over a bed of hot lava, and she had to stay upright on the crazily accelerating thing or she would fall and become charred herself. She could feel the blistering heat rising from below. Bits of hot ash swirled around her and singed her hair and face. Finally she let out a terrified shriek, and that had jarred her awake.
Lying there in the pitch-blackness at three in the morning, she’d made a decision.
When the call came in from Jessica’s agency later in the day, she was going to say yes.
She would ask Barbara to lunch today after they’d put the spring issue to bed—not at the company café but somewhere out of the building—and tell her then. She wasn’t looking forward to the conversation, but it had to be done. Barbara could argue all she wanted that more income wasn’t the be-all-and-end-all answer to her money problems, and she might well be right—but let’s be realistic: a major bump in salary sure wouldn’t hurt any.
She grabbed her bag and stepped out into the vestibule, realized it was pouring outside, stepped back inside to grab an umbrella, then took off for the L train, doing her best to avoid the worst puddles as she plowed through the miserable weather. She’d gotten a late start, and besides, she had no plans to stop and talk to Henry today anyway. Enough of the million-dollar fantasies. In fact, maybe she should skip the latte and breakfast muffin altogether and just get to the next train.
Still, as she walked, she couldn’t help continuing to sift through her little mental collection of Henry notes. Her editor’s brain wouldn’t leave it alone.
At the magazine, she would get pieces that had some good writing in them but whose overall point was fuzzy and hard to pin down. Sometimes the writer had tried to fit too many ideas in. Other times they’d left key points out. Or they’d suggested a solid idea but didn’t develop it well or bring it to its natural conclusion.
So, what was the natural conclusion here?
She’d made it nearly all the way to the train station, when she abruptly stopped walking. “Sorry—sorry,” she mumbled to a few pedestrians who bumped into her as she stood rooted in place.
How had Henry put it? Wealth, financial freedom? Not that complicated. It’s a simple three-step process . . . I call them the Three Secrets to Financial Freedom.
Pay yourself first . . . Make it automatic . . . That was two.
What was the third secret?
She did an abrupt U-turn and headed back toward Helena’s.
Ten minutes later Zoey’s umbrella was furled and standing upside down in the umbrella stand inside the coffee shop’s front entrance, and Zoey herself was perched on her stool across from Henry.
“Ah,” he was saying. “The third secret. All right.” He sat back and laced his fingers around one knee. “So let’s talk about what’s important.”
“Okay,” said Zoey. “Tell me. What’s important?”
“No,” said Henry, smiling and shaking his head. “That’s not how it works. You tell me.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“We’ve been talking about saving for retirement as if it’s something that matters . . . but how much does it, really? To you, I mean. Yes, you know it’s coming—in a half century or so. To me, my seventies are a fact. I’m living them. To you, though, none of that is really real, not right now. Am I right?”
He had a point. As much as Barbara’s images of women destitute in their old age had freaked her out, forty years in the future did seem like an eternity away.
“So let’s set the retirement question aside, just for the moment. What about your life? What about all the living that happens between now and four or five decades from now? What about your dreams?”
“My dreams?” Zoey shuddered. Oh, you don’t want to hear about those, she thought.
“Not your nightmares,” he said gently, as if he had read her mind. “Your dreams. Tell me something you’ve always wanted to do.”
The words popped out before she’d even thought about it. “Learn how to shoot amazingly beautiful photographs.”
“Photography lessons.” He nodded. “Good.”
“Not exactly an ambition that’ll set the world on fire,” said Zoey.
Henry cocked his head thoughtfully. “Don’t sell it short,” he said. “Bigger dreams are not necessarily better dreams. A dream is a dream. Sometimes the simplest ones are the most compelling. They’re certainly more accessible. Like this one. You want to take photography lessons. So, why not just do it?”
Zoey started to speak, but Henry stopped her with an upraised index finger. “Wait. There’s a condition here: you don’t get to say, ‘I can’t afford it.’ ”
“Okay,” said Zoey. She thought for a moment, then said, “Because they cost too much.”
Henry chuckled.
In fact, there was a local course she’d badly wanted to take for the past few years. It wasn’t that expensive—just under $600—but she’d never quite been able to scrape together the cash.
“All right,” said Henry. “Let’s look at this. Have you already got an automatic deposit going to your 401(k)?” Seeing her hesitate, he added, “No, you don’t.”
“No,” she admitted, “I don’t. But I am thinking about it.”
He lowered his chin and shot her a stern look. “I’m going to let that remark go unnoticed.”
She gave an innocent smile.
“So,” he continued, “now that you have—or once you have—a little money going into that retirement account, perhaps what you need is a dream account. Completely separate from your retirement account, set up exclusively to fund those lessons. Call it Zoey’s Photography Course Account, set up so that you automatically deposit into it, say, a hundred dollars a month. Less than three fifty a day.” (Another latte, Zoey couldn’t help thinking.) “How much does this class cost?”
“About $600,” said Zoey.
“Well, then. In six months, you go take the class. Dream achieved. Onward! What else have you always wanted to do?”
Zoey froze. For some reason she couldn’t come up with a single thing. “I . . .” She looked at him with both palms raised. “I’m drawing a blank.”
“Try this,” he said. “Close your eyes for a moment.” She did. “Take a deep breath: in . . . and out.”
Zoey took a deep breath, then let it out.
“All right,” said Henry. “Now think back to a time in your life when you experienced flat-out, unbridled joy.”
She took a deep breath, then slowly exhaled.
She was in the backseat of her parents’ car, heading north. She was seven years old, and they were all going on a road trip together up the coast of Maine.
Now she remembered the three of them walking along the ocean’s edge. The scrubby foliage, the eagles wheeling in the sky, the shoreline of big rocks and freezing cold water. Breakfast when they got back to the inn. The tiny blueberries bursting with flavor. And the best pancakes (blueberry, of course) that she’d ever eaten in her life.
“Huh,” she said, her eyes still closed. She hadn’t thought about that trip in years. She described her memories to Henry in murmurs.
She remembered the three of them going out on a lobster boat. Thrilling to the chop of the dark green waves. The feel of the rough wood in her hand when the captain let her control the tiller for a few minutes. She described it all.
“I’d never been out on the water before,” she said.
“So tell me, Zoey,” she heard Henry say softly. “When you’re there, on that little boat off the coast of Maine, how does it feel? What was it about that trip that you loved?”
Zoey opened her eyes and looked at Henry. His eyes were sparkling.
“It felt like an adventure,” she said. “Like we could just take off, go anywhere. It was like flying—that feeling of freedom.” She paused, then repeated the word. “Freedom.”
She closed her eyes again and thought about the word for a moment.
The Freedom Tower.
Her view every day from the company café: the Statue of Liberty.
“I think, maybe, that’s what I want,” she murmured. “Not just photography classes. That feeling of freedom. I just want to know I can do what I want to do, go where I want, when I want to do it.” She opened her eyes and blushed. “I supposed that sounds selfish. Or unrealistic.”
Henry didn’t blink. “I don’t know. Does it? Sounds reasonable to me. If you were put here on this earth to do something special, it makes sense to me that you would want the freedom to do it.”
Zoey gave a slight nod. “I guess. Yes, I see that.”
“So tell me,” said Henry, “when you’re on that little boat off the coast of Maine, feeling that sense of freedom, what does it bring you?”
She closed her eyes once more—and the moment she was back on the boat, the word leapt unbidden from her lips. “Adventure!” She opened her eyes and looked at Henry. “I never thought of it that way, but that’s what I want. The freedom to adventure. See things I’ve never seen. Go places I’ve never gone.”
Henry nodded. “And you work where?”
She gave him a puzzled look, and then her face relaxed into a grin. “Ah. Excellent point.” She worked as an associate editor for a travel magazine, polishing the words that described other people’s travels.
Other people’s adventures.
“And if I may ask,” Henry continued in a soft voice, “what kinds of adventures? Adventures that bring you . . . what?”
Zoey closed her eyes once more and thought about that. If she could go anywhere, do anything, where would she go? “Not skydiving or motocross,” she said. “Not mountain climbing. Adventures like traveling to see the most beautiful places in the world.” She thought for a moment again, then said, “It’s not the excitement, exactly. It’s the beauty of it.”
She opened her eyes.
Henry had his steel pencil out, and on a fresh page of his little Moleskine he had just written three words:
Freedom, Adventure, Beauty
“You know why most people don’t save, Zoey? Or if they do, they save only a pittance, and nothing really significant? Because they just don’t see the point.
“These”—he nodded at the three words he’d written—“these are the point. People talk about getting a bigger house, a better car, a vacation home, or just a better salary. But none of those things really matter. It’s what those things bring you that matters.
“These dreams of yours, Zoey, whether they’re short-term, like a photography course, or more long-term, like a trip around the world—these dreams are important. They’re more than important; they’re like oxygen. Without them, your life suffocates.
“That list is probably not complete,” he added. “No doubt you’ll want to revise it, edit it, add to it. But you might think of these as your values. These are, you could say, what matters. To you, I mean.”
He nodded at the page again.
“So here’s the question. Are the actions you’re taking and choices you’re making every day bringing you more of these? Is the way you spend your money lining up with what matters to you?”
Zoey thought for a moment, then said, “You mean, is it bringing me flat-out, unbridled joy?”
He smiled. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
Zoey gazed at the list of words. For some reason she thought of her mother’s voice: Oh, Zee, be happy with what you have! Was she?
She looked at Henry again. “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”
He chuckled. “Please.”
“What brings you pure, unbridled joy?”
Henry leaned back and gave her a long look. Finally he gave a small nod.
“Now, that is an excellent question.” He got up off his stool and said, “Walk with me?” They began a slow circuit of the big space as he talked.
“Thirty-six years ago, a good friend asked me that same question. I’d never asked myself that, and I was shocked to find I did not have an answer.
“I was not an unhappy man. Young architect with a good firm, good prospects, secure future. I liked the work I did, liked the people I worked with. But was it truly giving me flat-out, unbridled joy?” He shook his head slowly. “No, I had to admit, it was not. I was toiling away for hours a day to pay for stuff—stuff that wasn’t bringing me any closer to the life I genuinely wanted to be living.
“So I went to my employer and negotiated a little time off. Packed a bag, booked a flight, and left for Europe.
“At first, I said I was just taking a few weeks to . . . well, to reassess. I called it my radical sabbatical.” He chuckled. “Turned out, I never did go back to that job.
“My friends said I was crazy—that I was throwing away a perfectly good career. For all I knew, they were right. But for years, Zoey, for years I’d been telling myself, ‘Someday, Henry. Someday you’re going to travel the world, search out the most fascinating, beautiful, remarkable spots on the planet and capture them.’
“So I did. That idea that you should put off your best life until you’re retired—it suddenly made no sense to me. I gave notice at the firm and traveled for the next six weeks. When I came home, I took out a lease on a vacant little storefront in my favorite neighborhood, took out a small business loan.”
“And started a coffee shop,” said Zoey.
Henry nodded. “And started paying myself first. Owning my life. It wasn’t too many more years before I owned the building, too. And ever since that first trip, I’ve taken six weeks out of every year to go see the world. Over the last thirty-six years, I’ve been to over a hundred countries.”
All at once Zoey realized what had been right under her nose the whole time. She felt a shiver go up her spine.
“The photos,” she whispered. “These are all yours.”
Henry looked at her and smiled. “Like I said, that print you’re so drawn to? It’s my favorite.”
They had just arrived at the image of Mykonos at dawn, and now the two stood gazing at it again together.
“I remember the day I took that shot as if it were happening right now, today.” Henry’s voice was soft, with a far-off quality. “Moments after I clicked the shutter, I turned, put my camera down, got down on one knee, and proposed.”
“And she said Yes,” murmured Zoey.
“And she said Yes,” Henry agreed.
“Helena?”
Henry smiled. “Helena. Like Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in all of Greece. We first met right there, by that dock, just a few weeks earlier. It was that very first trip. My radical sabbatical. She came back to the States with me and, well . . .” He paused and spread his arms out in a gesture that took in all the photos throughout his coffee shop, a gesture that seemed to say, Here she is.
Helena’s Coffee.
“The love of my life,” he said. “And I have been saying Yes ever since.”
Zoey finally understood what it was that had so drawn her to this photo. It wasn’t simply the beauty of the scene. It was the beauty of the moment—a moment bursting with love and endless possibilities, radiant with golden light.
And now that she thought of it, that was true of all the photos there, wasn’t it. Each one held a special moment in Henry’s life, a moment suspended for all time.
And with her next mental breath Zoey suddenly knew, too, what it was about Henry, what it was she’d been trying for days to describe, that quality that made her want to be around him, that drew not only her but Baron and Georgia and Barbara and so many others. Something magnetic, she remembered thinking, like charisma, but that wasn’t quite it. No, it was a quiet joy, a kind of contentment. He was a person steeped in ten thousand moments, all of them lived richly.
It wasn’t that he was resourceful, or old-school, or eccentric, or charming, or clever.
He was rich.
Not just money rich. Life rich.
“So, is this the third secret?” she said.
Henry smiled. “Indeed. Without the third secret, the first two serve no real purpose. Without the third secret, the first two ultimately won’t work—because you probably won’t do them.”
He flipped his notebook back to the page where he’d written the first two secrets and now added one more line.
3) Live Rich Now.
“The first two secrets—pay yourself first, make it automatic—those are the how. This is the why. Figure out what matters, and follow that.