My Personal Definition of Money

As promised in my last blog, I am sharing my personal views about money such that together we may transform that which is no longer desired.

Money to me is a means of exchange goods or services for something of like value’ so it is an exchange for something that I value in some way. I have learned that money is not a route to happiness or fulfillment, the hard way might I add.

Gosh that was much simpler than I thought it was – coming up with my personal definition of money. What I notice about myself when I truly contemplate this definition is the things I want to purchase are not important any longer when I consider the word Value. When I consider the word value, I think of my core values of Inspired Action, Reciprocity, Connectedness, Flow, Awareness with the overarching Core of Peace/Harmony.

My husband, Chuck, and I have a television that is on its last leg. We are wanting to purchase a new one and went shopping over the weekend to see the new televisions he scoped out during his on-line window shopping escapade. I found myself getting creative my mind as to how to pay for the television – you see, it was 16% off retail, plus it was a tax free weekend. The pressure was on, the TV is a floor model and people were coming by and looking at it while we were there…I could feel the heat of consumerism settling in. “Honey, we really need to get it because if we don’t it will be gone tomorrow”. Sound familiar? We walked away without making the purchase. I did find a laptop table to raise my laptop to a comfortable and ergonomic level and was excited to see that it cost less than the ebay options I had been eyeing. In fact, I am using that table now.

As of this writing, I reflect on the feeling of pressure – self-imposed from my perceptions and interpretations of what was transpiring at the local Best Buy store. I now realize that those feelings were not aligned at all with my values which is equivalent for all intensive purposes to what I value. Chuck and I got home safely without spending almost $2k on an impulse or gimic.

We talked about settling for this television versus saving for the one that has the functionality that we really want. We are now saving for that purchase at a later date. So what if our current 15 year old television dies tomorrow, we will survive. We do enjoy watching movies and formula one races, the CBS Sunday morning show, NatGeo, Discovery, Travel Channel…in the evening as a background behind the blinking cursor of our laptop screen.

Do answer this question for yourself as a comment to this blog. I want to hear from you – we all have different definitions and this is a wonderful way to experience the diversity of relationships to Money.

In-Joy,
Darshana