Many people aspire to acquire ‘tokens of value’ within their lifetime, especially within this modern existence where what you own seems to be what defines us within an ego driven society of social demographics. While I believe this consumerist driven scenario is also largely by design ( that’s a story for another day ), it doesn’t mean for those that have eyes to see cannot make their own choices as to whether they want to participate within this ruse or not.
Whether it be the job you do, the car you drive, the house you own, the suburb in which you live or which schools it is your children attend, these and many others are the gauge sticks by which a large proportion of society seem to measure how well someone is doing but is it truly an accurate portrayal or reflection of what I would regard as true wealth or items of value?
To use a line from one of my favourite movies – Fight Club, ‘What you own ends up owning you’ I believe often largely rings true. Often, we work harder and harder to make more money to buy more things to impress people we often really don’t like, in an effort to show our peers the level of wealth we hold and therefore try and determine our success by such things, however within supporting this process we often regularly miss out on opportunities of true value and meaning along the way in supporting chasing the fabricated illusion of the things we buy or own making us happy.
How many of us have given up an opportunity to play with our children because the boss has called requiring something immediately, or cancelled having a coffee with friends because at the 11th hour work required you to complete a project? What about the immediate requirement of those close to us to have quality engaged time with us? Is this not just as valid and important too? I’m pretty sure when someone attends your funeral they’re not going say how much they are going to miss you completing those spreadsheets on weekends for them….
Quite simply for a lot of people, chasing financial wealth to bolster our own egocentric status in a society that largely measures itself by such means has skewed our priorities and as such the short term financial gains don’t necessarily make up for the truer long term gains that could be made and that we should be aspiring to attaining by living in the moment. More importantly we often damage our ability to foster and cultivate long term streams of revenue of true wealth as we don’t pay attention in seeing the value within these opportunities in the short term and therefore sometimes degrade or lose the ability to build upon these long term prospects of significant worth.
To me, there are simply two items that we are in possession of and when properly combined we are able to create the most abundant levels of wealth from.
TIME – This is a finite resource and as such needs to be managed so as to ensure we utilize the time we are given to the absolute best of our ability and in not squandering it in chasing items that aren’t of true value. As we don’t know how much time any of us have in the bank, it is therefore imperative that we utilize this most valuable resource as effectively as possible in ensuring it is used to our greatest advantage in maximizing the creation of as much wealth as possible with the finite resources available. Always remind yourself that you can never promise tomorrow to anyone as no one knows when their time is up and as such live in the moment so as to not waste this most valuable of resources.
EXPERIENCES – This is the true wealth we are able to generate from properly using our resource of time. In having life experiences we enrich our lives with items of limitless value, especially when sharing experiences with other. An experience shared is effectively wealth multiplication. When we are able to look back at the memories or our life experiences and in particular, the experiences and memories we have created and shared with others be that our friends, our families or most importantly our children, these are the things that truly give our lives items of limitless value.
To live a holistically wealthy and enriched life is to simply use the time we are given to create experiences and memories for ourselves and those around us. It doesn’t take a lot of money to be wealthy, all you need to do is be willing to share your time freely and in full engagement with others to create life experiences and within that you will become as wealthy as you will ever truly need to be.
Sometimes we just need to pause, breathe and simply remind ourselves of what the things are that are truly important in living a fulfilling existence and in that, re-discovering that we by our own existence have everything on hand that we already require in living a fulfilled existence.
Choose to live a life enriched by great life experiences shared with those around you.
That is the true wealth of our world.
After all… at the end of the day the life you choose to live is simply a life created by the choices you make.
