Wealth In All Forms, Shapes and Sizes

I went for a walk yesterday just as the sun was beginning to set and had cast its magical glow over the snowy fields and mountains. I wasn’t feeling particularly motivated to be out but I felt like I needed to clear my head after spending a long day at the computer.

The trail contoured a steep hillside.  I soon found myself at my familiar perch—a rock outcropping that overlooked the valley below.  I’ve looked upon this view countless times, but something struck me on this particular evening as I witnessed the lights coming on inside the houses below and the cars traveling on distant roads.

A passage from Deepak Chopra’s book, The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire, came to my mind. It reads:

“At a deeper level, there really is no boundary between selves and everything else in the world.  When you touch an object, it feels solid, as though there is a distinct boundary between it and you.  Physicists would say that we experience that boundary as solid because everything is made up of atoms.  The solidity is the sense of atoms bumping up against atoms.  But consider what an atom is.  An atom has a little nucleus with a large cloud of electrons around it.  There is no rigid outer shell, just an electron cloud.  To visualize this, imagine a peanut in the middle of a football stadium.  The peanut represents the nucleus, and the stadium represents the size of the electron cloud around the nucleus.  When we touch an object, we perceive solidity when the clouds of electrons meet.  However there is no solidity.  Is there solidity when two clouds meet?  No.  They meld and separate.  Something similar happens whenever you touch another object.  Your energy fields (and electron clouds) meet, small portions meld and then you separate…We can see how connected we are to everything else in the physical world.”

And these words came to me: “Even though it seems we’re miles apart we are connected by our beating hearts.”

It’s easy to go about our days focusing on ourselves without recognizing our connection with others. We forget that the clerk at the grocery store is a REAL person.  We forget that the people driving their cars are REAL people (especially when they cut us off in traffic!).  We even fail to experience real connection with the intimate people in our lives, because that person is “just our brother” or “just our mother.”  We assume we know who they are and how they act in all circumstances.  When we don’t like what we see in others we have a tendency to write them off.  When we do this we no longer experience a real connection with them.  However, whether or not we experience our connection with them doesn’t change the fact that we are all most intimately connected.

My grandma died over a year ago at the beautiful spry age of 101.  At her funeral many of the staff from the rest home approached my father to express how much his mother had meant to them.  They were touched by my grandma’s sincere interest in their personal lives. They were touched by her presence.  My dad on the other hand had a very different experience of his mother as he was growing up.  He experienced her as someone who was extremely controlling, and he always interacted with her in a defensive manner. As a result, he never experienced a true connection with her.  But that didn’t change the fact that he was connected to her.

When we think about building wealth in our lives, the first thing we tend to focus on is how we can create more money.  But we can’t overlook the simple but profound wealth in our connections with people in our lives.

We are profoundly and deeply connected with one another – whether we personally experience this connection or not.  To experience our deep connection with others is one of the most special forms of wealth that life has to offer.  Wealth comes in all people, all forms, all shapes and all sizes.

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