Money

I am currently enrolled in Money Management as one of my required classes for my minor and Josh couldn't be happier! Today was day one and I really liked this excerpt from The Soul of Money:

"Whether true or not, the thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of. We don’t have enough time, or enough rest, or enough exercise. We don’t have enough work or profits. We don’t have enough wilderness areas. We don’t have enough weekends. Of course we don’t have enough money—ever.

"What begins a simple expression of the hurried life, or even the challenged life, grows into the great justification for an unfulfilled life. It becomes the reasons we can’t have what we want or be who we want to be, why we can’t accomplish the goals we set for ourselves, why our dreams can’t come true, and the reason we give up on ourselves or write off others.

"Whether we live in resource-poor or resource-rich circumstances, even if we’re loaded with money or goods, many of us live with scarcity as an underlying assumption. It is an unquestioned, sometimes unspoken, defining condition of life. It shapes our deepest sense about ourselves, and becomes the lens through which we experience life. Through that lens our expectations, our behavior, and their consequences become a self-fulfilling prophecy of inadequacy, lack, and dissatisfaction. Scarcity is the mind’s interpretation of the experience of limitation. In the mindset of scarcity, our relationship with money is an expression of fear. The doubts and fears we don’t want to look at are our personal experience with scarcity.

"Contemporary European author, Bernard Leitaer, former senior office of the Belgian Central Bank, in his book Of Human Wealth, says that greed and fear of scarcity are programmed; they do not exist in nature, not even in human nature. Scarcity is a lie. Systematically challenging false assumptions and exposing the myth of scarcity opens new avenues of inquiry and possibility. We often philosophize about the great, unanswered questions in life. It’s time we looked instead at the unquestioned answers, and the biggest, most unquestioned answer of our culture is our relationship with money.

"Once we let go of scarcity, we discover the surprising truth of sufficiency. Sufficiency isn’t an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough. In our relationship with money, it is using money in a way that expresses our integrity; using it in a way that expresses our deepest core values rather than determines value.

"Sufficiency is an act of generating, distinguishing, making known to ourselves the power and presence of our resources, and our inner resources. There is always enough, [and to spare]. We have sufficient for our needs.

"In our relationship with money, we can continue to earn, save, invest, and provide for ourselves and for our families, but we reframe the relationship with a new recognition and appreciation for what we already have. In that new way of seeing, the flow of resources in our lives, rather than being something that is constantly escaping our grasp or diminishing, instead becomes a flood of nourishment and something we have the privilege of being trustees of for the moment. Our relationship with money ceases to be an expression of fear and becomes an expression of exciting possibility."

While I WHOLE-HEARTEDLY agree with the above quote (and could do MUCH better with implementing it), I often relate more to the following excerpt from a favorite show of ours:

Sheldon: You know, it occurs to me you could solve all your problems by obtaining more money.
Penny: Yes, it occurs to me, too.