Money can expand the opportunities of my life.

There's a specific kind of grief in not being able to go. The funeral three hundred miles away. The friend's wedding. The interview in another city on a Tuesday morning.

What money buys, before it buys anything else, is the ability to say yes to something that appears at short notice — a train ticket at the walk-up price, a day off that costs you a day's pay.

Opportunity sounds large and abstract. Mostly it arrives small and time-limited, and the only question is whether you can move.

Every bit of room you build makes the next yes cheaper to say.