quotation: Don’t put money before everything else -Pope Francis.
In the West, this is a hard concept to understand and grasp. We need money to live and perhaps even survive. What about when money becomes our raison d’etre? What happens when money takes over our lives and, for that matter, we obsess over one thing at the expense of living?
This is an open question we should live with, embrace, and explore daily. How does our living make the living of others better? There are no easy answers. In fact, there may not be an answer. Each time we explore this question, it may pose new questions.
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About ivonprefontaine
In keeping with bell hooks and Noam Chomsky, I consider myself a public and dissident intellectual. Part of my work is to move beyond (transcend) institutional dogmas that bind me to defend freedom, raising my voice to be heard on behalf of those who seek equity and justice in all their forms.
I completed my PhD in Philosophy of Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA. My dissertation and research was how teachers experience becoming teachers and their role as leaders.
I focus on leading, communicating, and innovating in organizations. This includes mindfuful servant-leadership, World Cafe events, Appreciative Inquiry, and expressing one's self through creativity. I offer retreats, workshops, and presentations that can be tailored to your organzations specific needs.
I published peer reviewed articles about schools as learning organizations, currere as an ethical pursuit, and hope as an essential element of adult eductaion. I published three poems and am currently preparing my poetry to publish as an anthology of poetry.
I present on mindful leadership, servant leadership, schools as learning organizations, how teachers experience becoming teachers, assessement, and critical thinking. I facilitate mindfulness, hospitality retreats. and World Cafe Events using Appreciative Inquiry.
I am writing and researching about various forms of leadership, how teachers inform and form their identity as a particular teacher, schools as learning organizations, hope and its anticipatory relationship with the future, and hope as an essential element in learning.
ivonprefontaine
Teacher as Transformer 
I scheduled a post for 11/21 that answers this question. A friend posted on FB Would you dump your best friend for 15 million dollars. I included the answers most of the young ones gave. Money is a necessity but it shouldn’t be obsessive. We live in a material world it’s not enough to just have food, clothing and shelter. We have to have cars, jewels and designer clothes and shoes.
Depending on where we live, we need some of the extras i.e. a car. The question is “what kind of car is enough?”
Exactly 15K or 150K.
I would find what happiness is first, then see how and where and in what balance money, possessions power status relate to being happy.
Compare money fame etc in a few lives
Robin Williams phillip Seymour Hoffman
Then look at mother Theresa
Where does money shake out here?
I see rich people unhappy as hell so money is not the path, my opinion.
They are and they think that more money/material wealth will make them happier. It is a vicious cycle which feeds on itself.
Questions leading to yet more questions. Very good, my friend.
Thank you.
May I pose a question.
Maslov’s hierarchy of needs, the basics. Does not need much money
So how do such lives like Nelson Mandela, in prison for three decades, obviously not being rewarded with money be so rich and fulfilling.
The Daili Llamas doctor was held in Chinese prisons for a decade, tortured and his only fear was if he hated the guards he would lose his spirit.
He showed no signs of PTSd ad and was still a happy man.
How can this be?
It can be, because material wealth is not the same as spiritual wealth and a conviction to high values.
very true words.
Thank you Sharmishtha.
there is something which is called enough. I have had enough for a long time, and i realize that enough is becoming less and less these days.
It is. Very well put Bert.
Only people who have been poor know how little money really matters. I grew up poor and as I grew older and gained more in the way of material things I eventually realized that I was much happier when I was poor. You actually have fewer worries when you’re poor and people love you for who you are, not what you have.
I agree. Kathy and I appreciate what we have, because we did not have much growing up. Even memories are appreciated differently.
Funny, a blogpost I’m working on for Tuesday touches into the same topic. Surfing the same wave? 😉
It is interesting how that happens.
This is a great thought to ponder, and timely for me as I have been wrestling with this idea. Thank you for putting the question out there to all of us . . . and I have no idea! 🙂
You are welcome. I agree it is a struggle to find answers to this question.
Reblogged this on By the Mighty Mumford and commented:
HEAR YE…..HEAR YE!!!!!!
Thank you for the re-blog Jonathan.
Thank you for following, I been hacked and started a new blog, I been looking for my friends but you found me first, will follow again.
I bought a car this year and it’s ridiculous we pay so much money for a logo on a car, kept comparing cars and some look so similar just a few things change. I kept thinking you can buy a house instead of a fancy car, and I did not mind my old car at all, but notice friends and family act so differently around me now that I have a new car, I do not think a car defines me or anyone for that matter.
Someone send me a email a long time…a teacher did an experiment with his students, he bought coffee and new beautiful mugs and some old ones. The students did not get any of the old mugs they all went for the new. He explain to them that this was our society, the media (society) tell us that we need money and new things and that we need more, more tv’s more cars. But in the end there are just things and what we are doing loosing is our values.
Thank you for dropping by to have a read!
You are welcome.
Ivonprefontaine:
My father, who passed away last August, had many “Quotes” and stories, (some held in books he wrote), several of them include these: ” Who ever has the gold makes the rules.” (It may have been Plato who originally said this) , “Never pay someone else to do something thatyou can do yourself.”, and, then his reply to people who say, “Having money doesn’t make everything good.” to which he would reply, “It doesn’t make everything profoundly BAD either.” My dad wasn’t a rich man, just one who loved a good quote, like those of the first Mr. Forbes of Forbes magazine, Abraham Lincoln and various scholars and authors of whom he became familiar with their work. beebeesworld
Quotes are the entry way into great conversations with people who are no longer with us. We can sit and wonder what they meant when they made that particular comment. I love the variety your Dad had in his quotes and people.
Righit now, all I want is enough money to meet my basic needs. My life is blessed with wonderful friends and family so what else could I need?
It is the people in our lives that are hard to measure.