Barcelona, Spain
I have changed my mind about money. Which is counter-intuitive. After all, this blog was founded on that whole idea.
I knew there is a formula for making money and I was determined on finding out that formula.
Somehow, it was the secret of life that I found.
It concerns it, but it is not money.
Sure, money helps, but there’s a more basic truth/secret that everyone should know.
Money – it is man-made. It is not natural. It never used to exist.
Everything was free. Everything. The air you breathe, the fruit we eat, labour, talent. Even the diamonds we covet, the gold that we flash and then hide depending on the depth of our depravity, the flowers the florists painstakingly interweave and intertwine. They were all in abundance.
They were free.
You see, because I was educated in the now, I did not know this. But I had a suspicion, a niggling doubt, something in the fringes that tells me things are not right. There’s poverty, there’s misery, and there are a lot of things that are not good in the world. Why?
When there is abundance.
I see it around me. In the flimsiest of arms hung ostrich/alligator/crodile/lizard bags, dainty jewelry snaked around slender wrists, diaphanous gown draped around nutrient-depraved-bodies, and in a sliver of a silver spoon, morsels of the most exquisite food (gingerly savoured or not).
It was there – a feeling, an imbalance, maybe righteous anger because of something that I did not understand. I felt a sense of injustice – but I constantly pushed it to the edges. I saw poverty, felt it sometimes; I felt want, felt need, felt envy that I had to close my eyes. But not yet. At least not in the beginning.
Because in the beginning, I revelled at life, I was happy in my innocence, in my naiveté. And then slowly, life crept in. The material sense (the ‘seventh sense’). Fostered by advertisements, by the well-to-do (friends, family, classmates who had the latest cornucopia of coveted possessions), those-whose-innocence-were-corrupted and those who tried to foster their belief in/at/to me by whispers/gestures/affectations that were calculated, calculating, intentional. Or maybe not. Money, you don’t have enough of it, you need more, you must want more.
[maybe they didn’t know too]
Yes. The not-so-subtle hints, the flashes of fortune by the fortunate, the salivating masses, their mouths gaping. Mass media and the movies, the corruption and exploitation of those who found themselves at the lower, unfortunate end of the spectrum.
Because money is important. That it is all there is. That which would make all things possible. The indispensable elixir to make dreams come true.
And even when I already felt that feeling – of desire/wanting more/maybe-greed, it always managed to surprise me. It felt – unnatural. Forced.
It made me miserable.
Is this all there is to life? Selling my time for 30 pieces of silver?
So what changed?
Life, priorities, learning more about money – knowledge gives the power of choice, enlarges one’s world, makes him aware that there are other paths.
Maybe the original path.
Look upon a child that is new born, or till he grows up to some few years: he is innocent, harmless, humble, patient, gentle, easy to be entreated, not envious. And this [was the first man]. – Gerrard Winstanley