My interest in self development has always been about finding inner peace.
Then a couple of years back, I started to get frustrated about the way I handle money.
I looked at money and money gurus.
I realised I hated people with money. They were bad people. Then I looked at a list of the richest people and found out the people I hated were doing a lot of good in the world. It was a nice thing to find out, though nothing changed in my personal circumstances.
I was in the bath earlier listening to an audio book. The author suggested we form our opinions when we are little children (by the time we are six) and they stay with us for life.
Great, I thought. So how could I apply that to money?
As I lay there in the bath an image popped into my head of me sitting on a swing in my childhood garden with a tin box on my knees. I am six years old. It is an image I have often recalled when trying to decode money issues.
In the box I have some money. A ten shilling note and a fifty pence piece. I am wondering over the shape of the freshly minted coin. It is not a hexagon or an octagon, it has seven sides. I often tell people the story. It’s quite a magical memory. But wait, I have left something out.
In the box is a book. The book has printed columns and I have carefully worked out how much money is in the box. The columns relate to pounds, shillings and pennies. I am the ONLY boy in my class who can do this.
There are twelve pennies in a shilling and twenty shillings in one pound. I had also finally figured out the meaning of a guinea, twenty one shillings. It had taken a long time to learn all this and it is very complicated. I even knew the relationship between crowns, half crowns, florins, sixpences and threepenny bits.
As I recall all this I am aware of a huge and overwhelming disappointment. It lives in me now like a “what’s the point” an absolute hatred, like a “have to” do. And I don’t want to, it ruins everything!
With pounds, shillings and pennies (L s d) I got to be brilliant. And here was a new shiny fifty pence piece. And with it, a new system. A hundred pence in a pound. Ten shillings (one hundred and twenty pennies) equals fifty pence. No more “If Tom buys five apples for threepence and Mary has a shilling, how much change will Jack have from a crown?”
I hated the new system, plain and simple. I had spent hours on the old system and now it seemed I had completely wasted my time. What was the point?
I was a very clever boy and could show how clever I was with money. Nobody else understood it. And THEY had ruined it!
Any idiot can add up base 10. Really!
What’s the point!!!
THAT feeling, associated with money?
I got…
I HATE MONEY
See you on the other side of the looking glass,
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mark Ty-Wharton
