Wealth Is What You Can Live Without

This may seem like a strange chapter in a book about how to get stuff, but if you've listened for the underlying message, you'll know it fits right in.

When you tell most people, "Nothing outside yourself is going to make you happy; you must make yourself happy," they nod approvingly, and more often than not think, "I'll make myself happy when I have a new house, lover, job, meditation blanket, etc."

The shock that takes place when someone realizes, "I have my Dream and I'm still not totally happy," can be either depressing or enlightening. Depressing, if one thinks, "This was the wrong dream. Now I need to find the right dream. — Then I'll be happy." Enlightening, if someone says, "Maybe my happiness does depend on me," and begins the inward journey.

"Not the fruit of experience," wrote Walter Pater more than one hundred years ago, "but experience itself, is the end." Robert Townsend said it for our generation, "Getting there isn't half the fun — it's all the fun."

Elizabeth Taylor has a needlepoint pillow in her living room. It reads: "It's not the having, it's the getting."

What's the true value of setting a goal and achieving it? It's not obtaining the goal, but what we learn about ourselves along the way. To get to our Dream we must be focused, disciplined, persevering, caring, worthy, excited, enthusiastic, and passionate.

What do we learn about ourselves? How to be more focused, disciplined, persevering, caring, worthy, excited, enthusiastic, and passionate. Goals come and go, dreams fade, but these qualities travel with us wherever we go.

"There is no end. There is no beginning," said Federico Fellini. "There is only the infinite passion of life."

This is our true wealth — the riches we take with us, the joy we carry inside, the support we learned to give ourselves, and the self-loving that flows as a natural by product of that support.

To the degree we can live without the things of this world, to that degree we are wealthy. The key word in that sentence is "live." We're not talking about austerity or sacrifice. We're talking about living. We live without them because, frankly, we can take them or leave them.

When we know how easy it is to fulfill a Dream (easy compared with how impossible most people believe it to be), we know we can take it. Once we are free to take it, we are free to leave it. "You never know what is enough," wrote Blake, "until you know what is more than enough."

Do not, however, make this an intellectual concept. Used as such, it's just another wonderful-sounding excuse for not pursuing your Dream. "The comfort zone hath power to assume a pleasing shape."

Go fulfill a few Dreams. Know you can do it. Have fun. Then decide for yourself.

Is this madness? Sure. "You have everything but one thing," Zorba the Greek told his young friend, "madness. A man needs a little madness or else — he never dares cut the rope and be free."

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