The Season of Appreciation

No amount of money will be adequate if one doesn't have the skill to manage it well -- not only in saving it, but more importantly, in spending it -- because that is when money can be exchanged for value even greater than money. That is the actualization of money at its exchange function -- which makes the biggest difference in individual lives.

For unfortunately many, their thinking is to get as much as possible, while giving as little as possible -- which is not a fair trade, but to exploit an inefficiency in the market -- until that becomes corrected, and those values no longer are available at such an undervalued price. But before that happens, the few who can appreciate values rightly, are the major beneficiaries of those inefficiencies at which the best are practically given away, because most people don't want them if everybody else doesn't see the value of them first, and are heavily promoted and advertised.

In this way, people who can think for themselves, and not simply chase the crowd, will experience the riches and richness of the world -- that the status quo vested interests, tell those under their sway, are not possible. That's how the world has always changed -- and not simply by giving the powers that be who always wish to remain so, "more."

When there are great disruptions in economies and societies, it is not because the world is getting worse, but is undoubtedly changing for the worse -- for a few, even as it is getting better for infinitely more. That's the situation we see in the world today, when many Americans complain that things were never so bad, because most of the world is gaining on them -- experiencing the life that only Americans used to.

Many are upset, that the great disproportions and inequities of fortune, are no longer just the privileges of Americans, but now have become the birthright of citizens all around the world. There is a certainly mentality, that derives its sense of well-being, from the knowledge that everybody else is worse off than they are -- and that is the only measure of pleasure they derive, and not the possibility that life can be good anywhere, for anybody, and ultimately, everybody. But that is not a possibility they can appreciate.

That is the conditioning (education) they've had -- to believe that in order for themselves to win, everybody else has to lose -- which is the destructive force in the world. Nature doesn't want everybody to lose so that she alone can win -- but wants as many to win as possible, which is first, realizing that possibility -- of fitness not being a competition for the survival of the fittest, but assuring it for as many as possible under all conditions and circumstances -- to enhance one's own, for the world is, one's experience of it.

It doesn't have to be a daily struggle -- but a realization of how things can be made better, beginning with one's own baseline functioning in it. Thus it is important to be firing on all cylinders, every waking moment of one's life -- beginning with the very moment of awakening as the single greatest moment for achieving that actualization.

That of course, is the moment one awakens from sleep -- and makes the transition to conscious activity, beginning at the most fundamental level -- of conscious breathing that radically changes (improves) one's operating conditions. This is a huge problem for many people as they sleepwalk their way through their day and lives -- knowing no other way of being, yet suspecting they could be functioning much better in the moment -- and not just in regrets for all the moments bungled and lost -- because one wasn't fully there, acting one's best, being one's best -- but recalling in horror, that they must have been somebody else, doing things they never would have done in their right mind and capacities.

But rather than thinking they need infinitely more capacity, the secret is the realization to do better with the capabilities they have already been gifted with -- which is to appreciate (make greater) that which one already has.