RICH
is how we all want to be, and rightly so. Wanting to be rich is our unconscious parallel rehearsal for a state of spiritual enlightenment. When we long for riches we long for all the qualities associated with a full and generous spiritual maturity.
In wealth, we see spaciousness and ease, the ability to rest; we see and long for a life where we do not have to try so hard, where we feel power over all of the things that seem presently to have power over us: with riches we want the ability to be surrounded by beautiful things and to have the leisure to appreciate those beautiful things, we want to reach a state where others perform daily and repeated acts of kindness for us, but act as if they are not being paid to do them, and above all, where we experience in every welcome, a seemingly automatic respect.
Being rich, we imagine, will allow us to travel and to travel comfortably with that magnificent comet’s tail of natural charisma associated with great wealth trailing behind us. We will be rich and therefore we will be somebody, and that somebody will always be creating a dash in other people’s lives. When we do arrive in other people’s lives, being rich allows us the ability to do the right thing at the right time for the right ones, to be a constant source of gifts, to be seen, in short, as a generous human being.
All of the many qualities associated with being rich, listed above, are laudable attainments and surprisingly, every one of them qualities historically associated with a form of spiritual enlightenment. Equally surprisingly, everyone of the qualities above: natural charisma, a generous disposition, a constant sense of the miraculous able to happen, in our own and in other people’s lives; a spirit that naturally invites help from others might be more possible with just a little money, rather than too much money, with just enough rather than too much. Which begs the question of how much money might be just enough money in my life; just enough where I am not held hostage in my life by the need for more: a question that is radical and transformative and rarely asked in most human lives.
Actual riches have always been more than tricky for most human beings, and our stories and mythologies are full of gleeful scenarios of the pitfalls, traps and havoc that wealth creates in a hapless human life; in fact, our inherited understandings of wealth in every culture tell us that too much in the way of material riches might not only be in the way of what we imagine being rich might grant us, but an actual obstacle to maturation, and even a step toward the inhuman.
Firstly, we know intuitively that inherited wealth, or a sudden windfall, or riches won too easily, always touches a core foundation inside us that feels undeserving, an undeserving core that drives us unconsciously into scrapes where we give away, or are embezzled out of our money, or alternatively, embarrass ourselves with investments where we might just as well have thrown our money to the four winds. This amusing and bemusing dynamic is repeated again and again with lottery winners and sudden surprising recipients of unexpected inheritances. We humans, strangely, always seem to want to get rid of what we feel we do not yet deserve.
Secondly, any strivings for earned riches, on the other hand, take tremendous effort and a long-extended focus over time, in which narrowing that focus day by day, becomes a practice in itself, a practice that also shapes the narrowing of our identity in a day-by-day, parallel way.
Despite the neglect of a son, a daughter, a spouse or even a circle of good friends who slowly seem to fade away, we can actually become proud of practising being a person with narrow priorities, and even celebrate in the morning mirror having become a person of pronounced but narrow views. We fall into a form of amnesia so that the earning of further riches constantly substitutes for the greater qualities we originally thought riches might provide. Becoming rich through our own effort where riches are the main goal, often involves a lot of counting and the sobering fact is, the part of the mind that does all the counting is the part of the mind that is least concerned about our happiness.
What we each practise on a daily basis is what we each become. After a lifetime of trying, or even succeeding at becoming rich, we almost always find we do not have the spaciousness of mind to spend time contemplating all the beautiful things we might have collected along the way. We might have learned to walk right past beauty every day on the way to the next most beautiful thing. In our long sacrificial journey to riches we might even find we have lost interest in anything that does not somehow continue to remind us, that we are, after all, rich. Under all the glittering surfaces we might find we are becoming exceedingly predictable or tedious, swathed as we are, so luxuriously, in our charismatic, but foggy halo of wealth. It is a cliché, but a cliché that seems to be a cliché because it is so true, that almost all billionaires I have met(there are marvellous, rare exceptions), despite the astonishing opportunities for growth in their lives, have the emotional intelligence of tedious, privileged adolescents.
Astounding wealth always puts us in danger of apprenticing ourselves to astounding arrogance: I assume, because of my untold, unfathomable wealth, the right to presume over others, and over other’s lives. None of us is immune: make me a billionaire today and you will not be disappointed, I will demonstrate tedious, privileged, adolescent behaviour tomorrow or sometime very soon. Being rich has always been an impediment to paying attention to other people and particularly to other people’s pain, being insulated by riches often prevents me from feeling a way into the core of another’s life, to the sorrow of another’s life, to being able to demonstrate real compassion for that life.
For those who do reclaim their memory, their spirit and their freedom after becoming rich, the greatest gift of being rich is always a sudden understanding of the obvious: just the spacious, radical simplicity of not having to worry about money itself. Which begs another rewarding question: why not be practical and start by worrying just a little about money, just exactly enough but not too much, from the very beginning?
‘Just exactly enough’ is an old Zen practice that as a question asked over time becomes a reward in itself. By practising a radical simplicity, by doing good work at the essential frontier of self-corroborated reward; by paying attention to beautiful things, that we might not have to own, like the hills or the trees or the horizon of the sea, why not, from the beginning, practise being generous in ways that need presence and imagination rather than ones that take large amounts of money and the endless hours to make that money; why not practise doing the generous thing now with the modest amount you have, where modest means always asking for real imagination to magnify what is modest, why not practise a simple quiet nobility, in a way that garners automatic respect, from the very start? Why not practise all the qualities of being rich right from the beginning, even when we have very little money?
There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to be rich, it’s just there are two very different ways of going about it. One that takes tremendous effort, a certain kind of amnesia, a focused and often exhausting ambition: very often cut-throat competition, a great deal of day-by-day counting, a necessity for constant self-justification and the steady but inexorable, narrowing of priorities.
Then there is the other way to riches that asks us to practise the art of being rich right now, before actually going through the possible degradations of trying to become rich: this other way of practising being rich before being rich, might be more practical and more attainable, and could be started today, with just a little courage and a little practice. Given that the young wish to be rich but after becoming rich simply wish to spend their money on becoming young again, we could start when already young or just when we feel young at heart. You never know, by a happy confluence, money and wealth might accidentally come along with it too. Rich is not just how we want to be in the future, rich, as we all come to understand on our deathbeds, is how we wanted to have been, all along.
As the Sicilian Briton said, fifteen hundred years ago, speaking to the whole spectrum of humanity: ‘There are three kinds of people in this world; the rich, the poor, and those who have enough’.
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Copyright Notice/ Attribution format:
David Whyte, Rich, from Consolations II: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. Copyright ©2024 David Whyte. Reprinted with permission from Many Rivers Press, Langley, WA. www.davidwhyte.com
