Author: ndinamoni@gmail.com

When was the last time someone sat you down and taught you what to do with money? Not how to earn it. Not how to spend it carefully. But what to actually do with it, so it works for you instead of disappearing. Take a moment. Think about it. For most of us, the answer is never. And the strange part is, nobody noticed. Not our parents, not our teachers, not the adults who sent us on grocery runs and called it a lesson.

I spent a good part of my childhood running errands. Grocery store. Market. Whatever needed fetching. Adults have a theory about this. Send a child on errands and they learn the value of money. They will count change. They will carry weight. They will understand that things cost something. And sure, I got good at arithmetic. I could add and subtract. I came back with the right items and the correct change. Mission accomplished. But here is what I did not learn. I did not learn that money could grow. I did not learn the difference between spending and investing. I did not learn that the purpose of earning is not just to spend more efficiently. Nobody handed me a list that said: here is how money actually works. Here is what the people who have it know, that the people who don’t, were never told. I was being trained to be a very reliable consumer.

The two books I read recently, The Richest Man in Babylon and Rich Dad Poor Dad, made me quietly furious. Not because they were bad. Because they were so good. Because the ideas in them are not complicated. Because a child could understand them. Because nobody told me any of this when I was a child. One book was written in 1926. The other in 1997. Between them they have sold hundreds of millions of copies. And yet here we are, generation after generation, still sending children to the shop and calling it financial education.

I don’t say this to blame anyone. The adults in your life probably did what they knew. We pass down what we were given. But I keep coming back to one question. What exactly were we given?

I was at the trailhead at 5:45 am. Got parking. The group arrived after 6 and the lot was already full. They parked on the road.

That sunrise from the parking lot. Worth the early alarm by itself.

We started at 6:15. Ten of us. Strangers, mostly. The kind of group where you don’t know anyone’s last name but you’re about to spend two hours sweating together on a mountain. That counts for something.

Except we didn’t quite sweat together.

The initial climb is steep. No easing into it. The trail just goes up and keeps going up. And that’s where the group of ten quietly fell apart. Different paces, different lungs. By the time the climb leveled off, we were already in small clusters scattered across the trail. So much for the group hike.

Somewhere around the middle, a few of us broke away and scrambled up a small hill. That’s where Phoenix opened up below us. The whole city just sitting there, quiet and spread out. Worth every extra step.

Then the rocks. There’s a narrow passage where you have to turn sideways and squeeze through. My fellow hikers found that very entertaining. They made sure to get it on video. There were other spots where you had to actually get down and crawl. Full commitment.

Two hours not counting breaks and photo ops. Good two hours.

COVID sent everyone home. For the first time in my working life, I had to think about where I worked. Not just when or how, but where. The options were not inspiring. The kitchen table. The couch. The bed, which was already occupied and not entirely available.

I gave it about a week. Then I made a decision. If I was going to work from home, I was going to work properly. I spent around three hundred dollars. A chair. A small plastic table. And a monitor that connected to my laptop.

Suddenly I had two screens. The laptop for sharing my screen on calls, the monitor for everything I actually needed to work on. I could present from the laptop while working quietly on the monitor. Documents, spreadsheets, notes, all visible to me while the call saw only what I wanted them to see. I became the person people asked to share their screen because I had the setup to do it cleanly.

Three hundred dollars changed how I worked every day.

A colleague of mine was struggling. Capable person, responsible, good at his job. But every time he had to share his screen on a call it became an ordeal. He had multiple windows open across different applications. He would share one and the moment the conversation moved to data sitting somewhere else, he had to stop the share, navigate to the other application, and start sharing again. Every switch was a small interruption. Every interruption broke the flow of the conversation. It was painful to watch because the solution was so simple.

I suggested he get a monitor. I told him it would make his life easier. I meant it genuinely. I had seen what it did for me and I thought he would see the same.
He told me the organisation should buy it for him.

I thought about pushing back. I thought about saying that the money was not very much for something that would make every working day better. I thought about making the case more strongly.

But I looked at how certain he was. How completely settled he was in his position. And I let it go.

Some people see a small problem and fix it. Some people see a small problem and wait for someone else to fix it. I do not think either group fully understands the other.

My colleague never got the monitor. I do not know if he ever struggled less.

A friend of mine is a serious photographer. Or was. He invested heavily over the years, good cameras, multiple lenses, equipment that most hobbyists would envy. It is all stored away safely now. He regrets not pursuing the hobby more actively. The technology moved on, he tells me. Mirrorless cameras replaced DSLRs. Metal lenses arrived. What he has feels dated. And so the cameras sit.

I understood that feeling more than I admitted.

A couple of years ago I went out shooting with a group of bird photographers. Bird photography is a different discipline. It requires telephoto zoom lenses, the kind that let you observe a bird at a distance and fill the frame with it at full length. These photographers had serious equipment. Long, heavy lenses that meant business.

My lenses had zoom capability. Just not like anything they were carrying.
I got intimidated. Not by the photographers themselves. They were generous and welcoming. But by the gap between what they had and what I had. I started worrying that I would eventually feel compelled to spend money I did not want to spend just to keep up. So I quietly stopped going out with them.

That was the wrong decision. But it took me a while to see it.

A few weeks ago I picked up the camera again and made a deliberate choice. I had been carrying three lenses every time I went out. The constant switching between them was a distraction, always wondering if I had the right one on, always second guessing. So I decided to carry just one.

A prime lens. 85mm.

A prime lens does not zoom. If you want to get closer to your subject, you move your feet. That is the only option. It sounds like a limitation and it is. But limitations have a way of focusing the mind.

In downtown Phoenix, shooting with just the 85mm, I got some shots wrong. Angles I misjudged. Distances I miscalculated. But I was thinking differently, about composition, about where I was standing, about how I was relating to the subject rather than just adjusting a lens to compensate.

When I messaged my friend about it, he was happy. Happy that I was picking up the camera again. Happy that I was writing again too. His cameras are still stored away. But something in the conversation felt like a small door opening.

You do not need the perfect equipment to pursue what you love. You need the one lens you already have and the willingness to move your feet.

Constraints do not limit you. They teach you.

In Paris, I picked up a camera. The city made it easy. There were groups, there were streets made for wandering, there were a hundred reasons to point a lens at something beautiful or strange. After Paris, life got in the way. The UK came and went. The camera stayed but the outings did not.

I have become more reserved over the years. Not just with people. With cameras too. Street photography is an intimate act. You are capturing someone’s life without asking. The privacy of strangers weighs on me in a way it did not when I was younger and less aware of such things.

In Phoenix there is a group that does this. The timings never work for me. So one evening I decided to go alone. Just me and the camera in downtown Phoenix during golden hour.

The first few minutes were uncomfortable. That particular apprehension of standing on a street with a camera, wondering if you have any right to be there. And then I started shooting. And I forgot everything else.

Two things happened that I did not expect.

The first was a man pulling a collapsible wagon across the road. I spotted him from a distance and waited, the way street photographers do, for him to enter the frame just right. I looked through the viewfinder. Nothing. I looked up. He was walking directly towards me.

“What did you shoot?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I was planning to take your picture but you walked towards me.”

He laughed. We both did.

The second was during golden hour. A person walking into the light, the kind of silhouette that makes you hold your breath. I was about to press the shutter when someone appeared at my elbow and showed me his phone screen. He had taken the same shot. We stood there comparing what we each saw in the same light. Smiles. A brief conversation. Two strangers on a street with cameras and nothing else in common.

The passersby smiled too. Encouraging, unhurried smiles.

I went out worried about intruding on people’s lives. I came back having connected with them instead.

I should not have stopped doing street photography.

In January 2009, I wrote my first post on Nona’s Pensieve. I called it “Booting up.” It felt like a big deal then, finding the time and the courage to write.

A lot has happened since.

I wrote through 2009, through the years that followed, through different cities and different versions of myself. Somewhere along the way I tried to monetize it. I watched the views. When the money did not come and the views did not grow, I got worried. Then distracted. Then I stopped.

That is the truth.

Life felt different without writing. I did not expect that.

So here I am. Booting up again. Same name, new home. No monetization. No obsessing over views. Just writing on my own space, at my own pace, about whatever catches my attention.

It would be nice if you read it. It would be lovely if you commented. But that is not why I am here.

I am here because I missed this.