The other day I found myself listening—really listening—to the background noise of our culture. Not the loud political arguments or the endless commentary about war and elections. Something more basic than that.
It was the sound beneath it all.
“Kaching.”
It’s the sound of the cash register, the market ticker, the bottom line. It’s the unspoken assumption that whatever matters must be measurable, bankable, convertible into profit. That’s the real world, we’re told. Everything else—reflection, imagination, interior conversation—is at best a luxury and at worst a problem.
How impoverishing! Too bad.
Such reflections were stimulated by seeing the play “Primary Trust” at the Country Playhouse here in Westport, CT. As the play unfolded, I found myself inwardly applauding the theater’s artistic director, Mark Shanahan. He had the courage to present what seemed to be a brave act of resistance to the values I’ve just lamented.
The play centers on Kenneth, a quiet man who has built a life around routine, books, and a nightly visit to a tiki bar where he drinks mai tais and talks with his best friend Bert. As it turns out, the mai tais represent for Kenneth his own “ties” to a past characterized by the premature death of his mother and the feelings of abandonment that followed.
Only gradually do we realize that Bert is not “real” in the conventional sense. He’s part of Kenneth’s inner world—his ongoing conversation with life’s invisible dimensions – memory, loss, the transcendent, and whatever within us refuses to surrender to the prevailing ethos.
Within that ethos, a discovery like Kenneth’s usually ends the discussion. We diagnose. We label. We move on.
But “Primary Trust” won’t let us do that.
It invites us to look again.
That’s because Kenneth is not empty. He’s not insane. He comes out of a world of old books and inward dialogue. He lives with a kind of attentiveness that most of us have long since traded in for survival and Kaching. Even his name suggests it—Ken: to know. He knows things, though not the kinds of things that show up on a résumé.
In fact, there’s a sense in which Kenneth’s inner life is more real than the world that surrounds him. It’s slower, deeper, more attentive to presence—even if that presence takes the form of someone unseen.
And then comes the turning point.
It happens, significantly, in a bank.
Of all places.
Kenneth has lost his job in the bookstore—that sanctuary of memory and reflection—and now finds himself employed in the very heart of the “Kaching” world. Numbers, transactions, polite exchanges with customers. The measured, monetized version of reality.
And it’s precisely there that his inner world erupts.
Bert begins to distract him. Press him. Threaten, in effect, to leave.
It’s a strange scene, but also a revealing one. Because what’s happening is not simply that Kenneth is “losing focus.” It’s that the world he has relied on to hold himself together is beginning to fracture.
At the same time, a real customer stands before him—another human being, with needs, questions, expectations.
Kenneth dismisses her. Abruptly. Rudely.
And just like that, he loses his job.
If you wanted a single image to capture the play’s central tension, that would be it. A man caught between two worlds—one inward, one outward—failing, at least in that moment, to inhabit either one well.
It’s tempting to read that scene as proof that Kenneth’s inner life is the problem. That it distracts him, disables him, renders him unfit for the real world.
But I think that misses something important.
Because the bank itself—the setting of that collapse—is not neutral. It represents a world that until his arrival has no real place for the kind of attentiveness Kenneth embodies. A world that measures worth in transactions and efficiency. A world where “knowing” has been replaced by calculating.
“Kaching.”
And yet—and this is where the play refuses easy conclusions—the alternative is not simply to retreat further into the inner world.
Because that world, for all its richness, is also controlled. It is safe. It is predictable. Bert may challenge Kenneth, but never in ways that truly escape Kenneth’s own boundaries. There is no real otherness there.
Which brings us to Corrina.
She enters Ken’s world not as an idea, not as a projection, but as a presence he cannot control. She listens, but she also responds. She’s patient, but not infinitely so. In short, she’s real in a way that Bert cannot be.
And that’s where things get risky.
Because to move toward Corrina is to risk losing Bert.
To move toward relationship is to risk the collapse of the carefully constructed world that has made survival possible.
In that sense, the bank scene is more than a plot point. It’s a kind of collapse—almost what the Tarot would call a Tower moment. Everything that seemed stable is suddenly revealed as fragile. The structures fall. The old securities no longer hold.
And as anyone who has lived long enough knows, those moments are not optional. They come whether we want them or not.
The question is what follows.
In the Tarot sequence, the Tower is not the end. It’s followed by the Star—a card of quiet hope, of reorientation, of a different kind of light. Not the harsh glare of the marketplace, but something softer, more enduring.
Something like trust.
And that, of course, is the title of the play: Primary Trust.
Not trust in the market. Not trust in the structures that promise security. But something more basic—the capacity to trust reality itself, including the presence of others who cannot be controlled.
Even the play’s small details seem to gesture in that direction.
Take the drinks.
Kenneth’s mai tais are sweet, almost childlike, a bit escapist. They belong to a world of fantasy, of tiki bars and softened edges. They soothe.
Martinis, by contrast—the drink Corrina orders—are sharper, clearer, less forgiving. They don’t cushion reality; they present it.
Different spirits, you might say.
Different ways of inhabiting the world.
By the end of the play, nothing is neatly resolved. Kenneth doesn’t suddenly become someone else. He doesn’t abandon his inner life—and thank God for that.
But something shifts.
He begins, tentatively, to step into a world where he is no longer the sole author of the conversation. Where the other is truly other. Where trust is no longer self-contained.
And that, it seems to me, is the real point.
Not that the inner world is an illusion to be overcome.
And not that the world of “Kaching” is where truth resides.
But that we are called—each of us—to pass through the collapse of our certainties, to hold on to whatever depth we have been given, and at the same time to risk the encounter that makes love possible.
It’s a hard passage.
From mai tais to martinis.
From the Tower to the Star.
From a world we can manage to one we cannot. But it may be the only way any of us ever really learns to live.
About Things That Matter 