Unraveling the Myths of the Wealthy Heart.

How do you stay connected when everyone around you is thirsting for money?

Years ago, I would have trotted out a simple and surface answer to this question.

I would have said, “Make time for your family and the people you love the most.”

That money will follow passion.

That questing for money or dreaming of it is selfish and shallow.

That the people who work to be happy are the smartest workers.

I would have sniffed in my own self-righteous way of being above such petty lusting.

And then I started working with millionaires.

I told myself that I could work with people who defied my values. It might be difficult, but it would allow me to forge gaps of misunderstanding and assumption.

After all, I had grown up poor and I was deeply connected to the belief that I should be proud of myself for getting by on so little.

I had patted myself on the back for that very reason innumerable times and years.

And before a barrage of comments barrels in and pins me to the board, let me explain.

Money for the sake of wanting money not to reinvest in others but to enjoy a person’s lifestyle is not wrong. But lording finances over the head of another person going without is.

Money to provide a lifestyle to help your family get ahead is admirable.

Etc.

[Your turn to insert your own values].

Now, I know money is a tool. And just as we make assumptions about lower-income individuals so, too, do we make assumptions about people of wealth.

We assume that a person of wealth is selfish. They are hoarding all their money and are not charitable.

We assume these people have no interest in making the world better.

And we assume they do not deserve what they have worked for…while having no information about their journey or motives or struggles or anything else that is none of our business.

We allow the same poisonous beliefs we have about money to poison the people we decide have too much of it.

We assume we know their political affiliation and even the reason they choose to align with one side or the other, or the middle.

Money is simply one more polarizing excuse we assign ourselves to allow us space from what terrifies us. From hoping we can be as fortunate. Because if we don’t think like the people who are different from us and who we judge, we will never be like them.

But we will also never truly know them and so, we can’t truly know ourselves or the impending peace that coming together means.

Before we can know peace, we have to engage in gruesome and deep conversations that will set off internal screams.

There is no other way to accomplish harmony.

Money is a tool that can improve your life, and maybe the people around you aren’t money-hungry, but maybe they are productive folks advancing issues every day? Maybe they are going to be the ones we need to better understand so we can talk to them about what needs to be done to fix this effed-up world?

Some of the most benevolent hearts I have ever beheld have lived in the chests of the affluent.

But I never would have known that if I hadn’t remained open to learning what I feared.

Money is not the root of all evil.

Biased hatred is.

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