Something is stuck in the universal field. Most people I know are at a crisis point around money. One fell victim to a highly orchestrated scam. Another is living far below paycheck to paycheck. For some, clients are scarce and for others, contracts end abruptly. Foreclosures have happened or are looming and businesses are folding.
What is it that we are being asked to look at, accept and heal? I am a part of the community whose members believe that we are here to learn lessons through life experiences. Critical mass is reached and then there is change. The hundredth monkey, suffrage, civil rights, human equality. We are in the midst of a financial upheaval. The occupy movement, the 99%. Our issues with money take myriad forms but we all have issues.
HBO premiered a new documentary about the working poor. Politicians in state capitals and in Washington debate the minimum wage. We live with the mistaken belief that if we identify ‘the problem’ we can have ‘a solution.’ We want to cling to the false security that comes with simplicity. Living with complexity, uncertainty and not knowing is a huge challenge.
I think there is an opportunity for a new discussion. How many problems would cease to exist if basic needs were met? Buckminster Fuller said “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” He believed that the idea that everyone must earn a living is false. “The fact is today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest….We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist.”
He suggested that once basic needsare provided, “The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
Many of us have chosen to do work that is not currently valued. Barbara Marx Hubbard has said that many of us, at this evolutionary time, are doing jobs that now have no job titles but will be accepted and valued by society in the future.
Let us begin this new discussion about money, worth, compensation and support. When we open the door to possibility, the world changes. Limiting and outdated beliefs are keeping people from being helped to find their voices, heal their lives and take their true places in the world.
Join in the discussion. Let’s challenge some beliefs and shift the energy around money.