Meditations on Wealth
Last weekend was Chicago's fabulous Green Festival, a two-day extravaganza of colossal proportions with dozens of speakers and endless booths centered on improving our planet.
The issue hits close to home, and to the heart of what I love about my work: helping people to live more organized, efficient lives, and therefore live more in alignment with their values and life purpose. When we're organized and really in tune with our purpose, we find we don't need so much stuff.
As a broke student putting myself through a private college in the early-90s I traveled throughout India for 4 months, and my image of myself as "poor" drastically shifted while there. I remember vividly seeing myself for the first time as very lucky and rich during an all-night train trip where I slept snugly on a windy berth in my warm sleeping bag. The bag wasn't just warm -- it had special drying properties, was lightweight, and stuffed into a miniscule little bag when not in use. Other local travelers had thin wool shawls, if anything, and shivered throughout the night. How rich I was to have such a fancy sleeping bag, it was almost embarrassing. And how poor I had been just a month earlier, thinking myself as lacking.
It's very easy to fall into a poverty mindset, to see ourselves as wanting. I still do it all the time. But I also take time to situate myself in reality, in the reality of the entire world. Lack of access to clean water is one of the main causes of infant mortality around the world. I recently heard an interview on the NPR program Worldview where a man with a dancing troupe from Africa was visiting the US for the first time. He was asked what struck him most about the US, and he spoke of his surprise over the wide availability of water here. He was amazed that you'd sit down at a restaurant and they'd just bring you water. There, where he was from, you'd walk miles to collect dirty water from a contaminated river.
If we all brought that kind of awareness to each glass of clean water, imagine how rich in spirit -- the real kind of wealth -- we would be.
The issue hits close to home, and to the heart of what I love about my work: helping people to live more organized, efficient lives, and therefore live more in alignment with their values and life purpose. When we're organized and really in tune with our purpose, we find we don't need so much stuff.
As a broke student putting myself through a private college in the early-90s I traveled throughout India for 4 months, and my image of myself as "poor" drastically shifted while there. I remember vividly seeing myself for the first time as very lucky and rich during an all-night train trip where I slept snugly on a windy berth in my warm sleeping bag. The bag wasn't just warm -- it had special drying properties, was lightweight, and stuffed into a miniscule little bag when not in use. Other local travelers had thin wool shawls, if anything, and shivered throughout the night. How rich I was to have such a fancy sleeping bag, it was almost embarrassing. And how poor I had been just a month earlier, thinking myself as lacking.
It's very easy to fall into a poverty mindset, to see ourselves as wanting. I still do it all the time. But I also take time to situate myself in reality, in the reality of the entire world. Lack of access to clean water is one of the main causes of infant mortality around the world. I recently heard an interview on the NPR program Worldview where a man with a dancing troupe from Africa was visiting the US for the first time. He was asked what struck him most about the US, and he spoke of his surprise over the wide availability of water here. He was amazed that you'd sit down at a restaurant and they'd just bring you water. There, where he was from, you'd walk miles to collect dirty water from a contaminated river.
If we all brought that kind of awareness to each glass of clean water, imagine how rich in spirit -- the real kind of wealth -- we would be.
posted by A Simpler Life at 8:28 PM
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