Importance of Money in our life

Money is an important part of our life. There is no doubt about it. Without it we can not survive in today's materialistic world. We need money to buy any thing and every thing we require for living on daily basis. We need it for our food, clothing, housing, transport, recreation, education, health and what not. We have resources for our consumption provided by nature around us. But except air and water, everything else needs to be bought with money. Sometimes, even water is also packaged as a purchasable commodity and if you need pure oxygen for your breathing, you have to have money to buy it.
         In the above scenario, there is no scope to say that we do not need money or money is not important for us. But important is ok, the question is how important money is in our lives and how much money we need. Actually, when money fulfills our basic needs like food, shelter, clothing and comfortable life style, do we need more? Definitely not. But who will decide what is the optimum or adequate amount of money needed by a particular individual? If the limit is decided by us and the same is not influenced by our greed for more money, we will find that there is enough money or resources in this world to cater to the needs of each one of us, but no amount of money can fulfill the greed of man kind. 
    If we look at money from another angle, more money may mean more comfort, more power, more respect in some society; but does it mean more happiness, more contented life. Probably not. On the contrary more money leads to more unhappiness. More money begets more desire to earn more money and its a vicious cycle. So it may be a better idea to stay happy with that amount of money which fulfils our basic needs and allow us to lead a comfortable life. Any amount more than that may not bring unhappiness if it comes naturally. But when we hanker after it or greed for it, we are definitely in for trouble.
    There is a saying that if you are successful in your chosen field, if your sincere and hard working, you have no need to run after money. On the contrary money will run after you. There is fair amount of truth in the above saying. Probably money is a commodity, which will elude you if go after it purposefully. But if you do your work diligently to reach certain height in your chosen profession, money will come to you as a by-product of your success and professional competence. 
    So what should we advice our children for? To run for money or to achieve excellence in life. I think if our children pursue a good education, arm oneself with knowledge and core competence in a subject of one's liking and tirelessly work for excellence in one's own field, money will never be a deterrent. Rather money will come as a proof of success.
   But can everybody go after the prescription of success I just laid out above. Probably not. Because there are countless number of children from less well off parents, who cannot wait indefinitely for success to come to their way with the promise of money and comfortable life. So achieving excellence in their chosen field becomes a luxury in their life. In their pursuit of two square meals for the family, they compromise with knowledge and remain content with the money the get with their hard labour. But mostly money of their dream, money in abundance remains a mirage in their life time. The situation may change after a few generations. A descendant of them may succeed sometime some decades down the line. But that is another story, another dream.

Life Lesson

We learn many thing during our journey through this world, that is our journey of life. When we start our life, we know nothing. We learn things from our parents, teachers and elders. When we attain maturity, we have very few people older than us who are able to teach us from their experiences. That is when we become our own teachers. We learn from our experiences, our mistakes, from our surroundings, from nature etc.
     It is very true that one is never too late to learn. We learn so many things daily from our family, friends, colleagues and even from complete strangers whom we meet during our work or journeys. Recently, there has been a notable addition to this list of teachers, that is the internet. If we are willing, we can learn so much from the web. The resource in the web is enormous, only we need to know where to search for.
     What I feel that to learn new things, what is most important is not the teacher or the learning material. Actually it is the attitude of the learner is the most important factor in the success of the process of learning. If you have the attitude to learn, nothing can stop you from reaching your goal. On the contrary, if you do not have the attitude, no teacher can teach you anything with tons of knowledge with him.
      Of course, attitude is the most important thing in every sphere of life to become successful. If you do not have the right attitude, you can not be successful, you can not be happy, you can not be a winner or you can not be a role model for your followers. In simple words, right attitude is the key to everything we aspire for.
         So it is not at all impossible to learn new things or improve one's life even at a ripe age provided one has the right attitude to start afresh. Enriching one's life with new knowledge, good habits and practices is always desirable and it improves the quality of life and imparts a sense of fulfillment in mind. So we should always make an utmost endeavor to upgrade our lives with new qualities. 

Starting again after one year........

                    Last year, I tried to document my visit to Kerala in this blog. I wrote a number of posts, but somehow lost interest midway. After almost a year, I have decided to continue writing this blog and write whatever comes to my mind to do justice to the title of this blog, 'Mihir's thoughts'.
                   Lately I am exploring ways and means to improve the quality of life. There are beautiful guides on the topic available on the net. I am finding that it is never too late to start good habits, to move towards a healthy life style and to strive seriously to become a good human being. The only thing necessary in this endeavour is the attitude to accept change for the better.
                 There are many habits and behaviours of ours, which we repeat days after days, knowing well that they are not good and best be avoided. In spite of that we do not make any conscious attempt to correct the wrong habit and make the same mistake days in and days out only to regret our action later. But if we can sit quietly for a few minutes and ponder over the thing, deciding ways and means to not repeat the mistake in future with a plan how to do it, possibly it will make our life a little less complicated with chances of regretting our actions at a later date getting less and less.
                The only thing necessary to implement this improvement in our lives is our positive attitude towards change and inclination to improve our habits and behaviours for our own betterment.