What is Prosperity and how do we know when we have it?

I have a pattern around money and prosperity. (who doesn't?)

I have lived in constant fear that there will not be enough, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

I have always had enough. If there is a bit of extra money, I have several projects waiting for it and I spend it so that I am close to there not being enough again. I even use the 'I can't afford it' excuse for anything I don't want to do. When I really want to do something, somehow the money presents itself.

But are money and prosperity the same? Certainly not. The very financially wealthy do not seem to have a better life than those who are not. A spoilt child in the UK may feel seriously aggrieved if he cannot have the latest iPhone or designer trainers, while children who have very little have a lot of fun playing in the polluted water of the Ganges.

Then there is the question of greed. When does a person have enough? Do the rich folk who stash their wealth off shore to save some tax, ever feel that they have enough and are happy to contribute more to the general tax coffers because they have more? Of course, some do, but some don’t.

There are those who admire the accumulation of financial wealth and those who are cynical about how that financial wealth was achieved. If you are cynical about rich people, how can you become one?

We have many expressions extolling the virtues of poverty: ‘She was poor but she was honest’, ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God’, ‘To give is better than to receive’, etc. 

A native Amerindian woman in the Amazonian forest, where a friend was traveling, asked him ‘Why does the white man take more than he needs from the forest’.

In my old age the drive to have a bigger and better house, a bigger and better car, or a flashier and more glamorous holiday are replaced by a desire to have peace and serenity and the most exciting journey is to go inward and explore who I am.

I have enough, I have always had enough, it has taken me to my seventies to realise and appreciate it.

Frankie x