The Rembrandt or the cat?

Good morning! Your house is on fire.

Norwegian poet Georg Johannesen was once asked a strange but simple question:

“If the house is burning, and you can only save one thing, would you save the Rembrandt or the cat?”

Rembrandt paintings sell for up to $30 million.

Cats generally don’t.

Johannesen said he’d save the cat.

What about you?

When I read this story about Johannesen, my mind kept looping back to the same cliche — ”The best things in life are free.”

You’ve heard it a million times, right?

And hearing it a million times has watered down its value, right?

And now when you hear it, you get a little exasperated with the person saying it, you brush it off as empty advice, and you go back to pushing for more money or a better job or a nicer house.

You stand there trying to yank the Rembrandt off the wall, too caught up in its material value to notice the flames are starting to lick your shoelaces.

And all the while, the cat is perched on the windowsill, staring.

Right?

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It’s a funny paradox:

The things we can’t place value on are priceless. 

The things we put price tags on are worthless.

“The best things in life are free” is a wonderful reminder of the pricelessness of relationships, sunrises, or that feeling you get when you become aware you’re in the middle of one of those moments that you’ll think about forever.

But because that phrase has been spoken a few thousand times a day since Adam and Eve chomped the apple, it’s gone from being a can’t-miss piece of wisdom to a haze of white noise that makes us want to tell the speaker to just shut up and give us some real advice for once in their lives.

Which is unfortunate.

Because those seven words are a tried-and-true blueprint to contentment.

Meanwhile, anything that has material value has no real value at all. None of it is really yours. It’s all rented, ready to be passed down or thrown out or sold at an estate sale while your corpse is settling in at your new home six feet under what could be a really nice piece of land.

We all know the best things in life are free.

And most of us say we’d save the cat.

But in our day-to-day lives, our actions often suggest it’s the Rembrandt we’re after. Because once we finally have that secure, we’ll never want to save anything else again.

Until the next fire, that is.

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The reality?

Every day you wake up, your house is on fire.

And every day, you get a chance to make that decision again:

The Rembrandt? Or the cat?

It’s smart to push for more in life. It’s good to have goals. It’s healthy to want to improve your situation.

But don’t forget that the best way to pile up long-term wealth is to fill your life with pricelessness.

You can put a price tag on a Rembrandt.

What about the cat?