Good evening, everyone
What do you think?
We have said that the love of money is “the root of all evil.” Yet we spend almost our entire lives preoccupied with earning it. Some even go so far as to kill or die for money. The means we resort to in order to obtain it and the use we make of it in fact reveal our nature—generous or stingy, scrupulous or dishonest, wise or imprudent. So, what exactly do we expect from money?
It seems to me that we can sum it up in two words: happiness and security.
Happiness is essentially elusive. One can seek and purchase pleasure, which is not at all the same thing. But true happiness is a mysterious visitor that only the wisest among us know how to invite.
It happens, moreover, sometimes quite suddenly. One of the happiest moments of my life cost me nothing. Finding myself one day in a difficult financial situation, I had gone to see a friend, who was also in a tight spot, with the intention of pooling our worries. One reached her place by a narrow staircase that began in a quiet courtyard. A large window lit the landing. It opened onto a blossoming apple tree branch swaying gently in the spring sunlight. That was all. But in contemplating that fresh and simple scene, I suddenly felt filled with joy and thought: “Now I know what happiness truly is, and I will never be completely unhappy again.” My money troubles were put in their proper place. And that is probably why I soon got out of my predicament.
The evil that afflicts too many of us is that we are accustomed to measuring our success by the material goods we manage to acquire. It is so easy to teach! One does not need to be highly educated to suggest to a child’s mind that a “happy life” consists of owning a nice car, nice clothes, and a house in an elegant neighborhood. It takes far more persuasion to get into a child’s head the idea that happiness, the true proof of a successful life, does not reside in the possession of material goods, and that, consequently, it cannot be bought with money.
Happiness is not acquired in exchange for hard currency; it comes when our door is wide open to it. Our false conception of the value of money can go so far as to close that door. Closed, this door jealously guards our treasure of material possessions, but the long-awaited visitor passes by and does not stop. We lose the ability to savor the true riches of existence.
But this is not found only among the privileged of fortune.
We all know people of modest means who are so obsessed with the thought of what is lacking in their family's happiness that they will never be able to enjoy the restful sight of an apple tree in bloom before their window or a friendly face on the sidewalk across the street.
I stayed with one of my old school friends who had spent her time grumbling all year round. She had then had everything a woman could desire, and nothing had been able to satisfy her. Today, when she had little left, the smallest thing satisfied her. It was that she had discovered within herself possibilities of happiness that money had prevented her from truly glimpsing in the past.
Our mistaken conception of the value of money takes different forms depending on whether we have too much of it or not enough. Remember the story of the two men who were pulled from a river on the same day. The first, a poor man, had accidentally fallen into the water after excessively celebrating his 100,000-euro lottery win. The other, an unlucky financier, had committed suicide because he happened to have exactly 100,000 euros left. The disproportion of that sum relative to the level of well-being they were respectively accustomed to had driven both of them to lose their minds, and their lives. Of course, it was not money per se that caused their deaths, but what money represented in their eyes: for the first, everything he had had to go without in the past; for the second, everything he believed he could not go without in the future.
If we make money an obsession, it is because we suffer from an inferiority complex. Money appears to us as a protection against what Shakespeare called, in Hamlet, “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”
The ideal is to strike a compromise: save, but don’t let fear drive you to skimp on everything. When things get tough, I rein in my spending. I never venture too far from the fallback positions I’ve set in advance.
It has not been easy for me to maintain a proper balance. At times, I have felt the love of money taking hold of me; I began to accumulate for the sake of accumulating. At other times, I am seized by panic at the memory of the poverty of my childhood years. But sooner or later, I find my bearings again: I put money in its true place: it is a means to achieve multiple ends, and nothing more.
For life is never free of dangers and never will be. Security was the illusion of the late nineteenth century and, like so many others, it has vanished. Rich and poor, we are all embarked on the same great adventure: the adventure of life. He who is constantly worried will remain vulnerable and powerless.
False is the consideration we today accord to wealth. It grants it an unrealistic importance. Once we have restored to its true place this medium of exchange, in itself valueless, which is money, we shall then be able to face opulence with wisdom and misery with courage.
unknown author
Marylena
