Contrary to…

My mother never asked me to make money.

She always asked me to make meaning.

Which, I suppose, came with its own set of pressures.

There were never any suggestions to be a doctor, an engineer, or to go into finance. My early interest in saving and investing and being financially secure came from myself, my own sense of instability and curiosity.

Instead, she took me to volunteer with her: at the local community centre, at the senior home, at church. She encouraged me to seek volunteer opportunities outside of what we did together. When I graduated high school, I claimed 400 volunteer hours.

She wanted me to write. She wanted me to tell my story, which was really her story. She encouraged me to put into words our journey from China to Canada, her struggles raising me as an immigrant single mother.

One time, she sat me down at the kitchen table and gave me a notebook. Write, she said. Write for two hours. That became my weekly task: On Saturdays, write for two hours.

She spoke with reverence about social service jobs: teachers, and social workers, and public servants were held in the highest regard.

The language of doing meaningful work is as familiar as air to me. Doing things simply for money or security was shallow. Although I was happy working in banking, I never considered it seriously, it never felt enough. True glory was being a good force in the world.

This cornerstone of how I was raised feels naive. And yet somehow it has worked. Because being raised this way is to grow into a person rooted in optimism: that the world can be better, that you can make it so, and that you can make a living and survive in it, too. It is empowering. But I think I also have a slight saviour complex. Problems need to be solved, and I need to be the one to solve them. And if I can’t, I’ve failed. But who made me god?

As the decade comes to a close, I wonder about the next. In ten years, I’ll be 33 years old. It still feels young, I think. But time is rushing. I feel the swoosh of the it carrying me far away from this moment.