General Discussion

My life has taken a very different path from yours, albeit with a few superficial similarities (ages since my last new car, cut my own hair, terrified of debts). Meeting my amazing wife at age 22 (we are now 73) was obviously a life's-lottery win of epic proportions.

The quote is by a fictitious Basque poet, living in the French Pyrenees in the 1970s, keeping away from the authorities on the Spanish side of the border, who never looked kindly upon Basque nationalists with dubious actions on their resumés:

“a man is happiest when there is a balance between his needs and his possessions. Now the question is: how to achieve this balance. One could seek to do this by increasing his goods to the level of his appetites, but that would be stupid. It would involve doing unnatural things—bargaining, haggling, scrimping, working. Ergo? Ergo, the wise man achieves the balance by reducing his needs to the level of his possessions. And this is best done by learning to value the free things of life: the mountains, laughter, poetry, wine offered by a friend...."

It's a quote obviously better suited to a fictional character living in a small village in the Pyrenees in 1979 rather than in present-day San Diego, a place I have been exactly once, and that was over 40 years ago. Still, the quote does carry a certain wisdom to it, especially "the wise man achieves the balance by reducing his needs to the level of his possessions." It's not always practical, but it's a philosophical goal to ponder, nonetheless.