“Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant.” – P. T. Barnum
Discover your relationship with money
Money seems to rule most lives and is one area where there is a huge influence of beliefs, comparisons, seeking validations, fears, etc. One free of the pressures of money could spend a lifetime pursing their passions and interests, rather than be in a survival mode, or work serving money. Money is a tool and nothing more. Like a knife. Imagine going into a kitchen and worrying excessively about the knife, instead of focussing on the cooking. Such is the relationship of many with regards to money. An entire life is spent thinking, earning, and worrying about money.
Over the next few blogs, we will closely examine what role money plays in our lives. Each step has the potential to provide insights that could help one move closer to financial freedom. Each of these blog posts is an important aspect of our relationship with money. Examining this will bring more awareness into different aspects of your own being. So go through each one of them, work on the activities suggested and do post your comments with your experiments here.
Is life possible without money?
The happiest communities I have come across rely on each other and on their surroundings and not on money. Their contentment is so deep one becomes curious about their way of living. They have answers to questions we have not even begun to ask.
- Kalyan Akkipeddi, Founder, ProtoVillage.
Many tribal communities have no concept of money. They directly meet their needs. They build their homes, grow/hunt/gather their food, travel on foot/animals they rear.
Some of us may have watched the movie, Gods must be crazy. The community of tribals who get whatever they need from their surroundings, they have an abundance of time and are entrenched in loving relationships, they don’t own anything and money has no value. Even a coke bottle disrupts the community. One who is living in a materialistic setup can look in awe at the opening scene of the movie, where the abundance of time is compared to the clock driven modern lives. One may see how far we have come away from caring for each other as we watch the scene where a tribal is upset by the man who won’t share what he has with others, and to the final scene of the movie where the tribal who receives hundreds of dollars throws them in the wind, because he doesn’t know what money means.
Over a period of time, people started moving out of their small communities. As a result they could not meet their needs directly. They would carry goods they had so they could exchange or barter for things they needed. Ambitions grew, and the desire to explore the world increased. Boats had to be made, trains invented and other modes of transportation were created. Now people were no longer stuck in a place and could move around freely. Carrying apples to exchange with oranges started becoming cumbersome and some form of money came into being to make life more convenient.
Money was invented to make our lives easier. We don't have to throw the baby out with the bath water and definitely don't need to think of money as a problem. Instead if we can embrace the idea that it is simply a tool which has enabled us to have more convenient lives, we can begin to have a healthy relationship with money.
Contemplate
Make a list of all that you need or want. If you had no money, how would you go about meeting these needs? For eg. if you want to read a book, you could borrow it from someone who has it, go to a free library and read, walk into different bookstores and read a few pages, etc. If you need food, you could examine who would be willing to feed you, which are the places that serve free food, where could you work in exchange for food, etc, what can you forage, etc. If you have to travel, you could hitchhike, walk or cycle.
Experiment
Try living one day without any money. Examine what changes in you life when you do this. If you feel confident or would like to explore more, you can try this for an extended period of time. Or volunteer your time in a community which will give you shelter and food in exchange for your services.
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