How you define poverty is a delicate matter. If you identify a successful life with economic security and a decent ownership of personal wealth ( i.e. house, investments, retirement funds) you probably will define poverty as having a very weak flow of cash.
If you identify the good life as filled with strong and generous relationships, you will define poverty as being alone; on the margins or without friends. Poor people have no friends!
As we move through life, we should be getting a better understanding of who we actually are: our good qualities and our weaknesses. Everyone else knows our weaknesses much better than we do ourselves. Self-knowledge comes only with a lot of hard work. The last person to ever know our faults and failings would be ourselves!
The revealing exercise is to take our finger and slowly move over our arms and legs after we have fallen and rolled down the stairs. We are trying to discover if there is anything bruised, bleeding or simply not working!
There is a gaping area of poverty in your person if you eliminate people because of their race, their gender, religion or their country of origin. A healthy, integrated person recognizes their blind spots towards people who are different. This does not mean that such a person does not have difficulties with people from other countries. There may be cultural blocks that limit how respectful we can be at this point in our history. Knowledge of self means that we do not have to rely on our young , adult children to point out our racist attitudes!
The person who will not share, whether it be their wealth, their time, skills and compassion is a very poor person. Their poverty is most often manifest in the word, ‘no.’ They have tremendous talents, a hard working schedule and a wealth of experience, but they are reluctant to every share themselves. People have learnt that you only receive the answer ‘no’ twice and you never ask them for any assistance again. Here you are rich in skills and work habits, but poor in helping your neighbor.
There are people who walk in deep poverty because they cannot see the good things in other peoples lives. The grandmother next door has twelve grandchildren and they visit almost weekly and you have no grandchildren! Their poverty is expressed in the absence of any joy over the good things that belong to the lives of others: steadfast friends, children and grand-children, golf buddies and good health. Their poverty is the absence of joy over the good things, the blessings, that flower forth from the lives of others.
Poverty is very real but first of all it is a poverty of spirit: our lives have big gapping holes in them: absence of generosity, not rejoicing in the goodness of others and no sharing. Such a person may have a strong cash flow but be very, very poor in their personal lives.
Look around. Where do you see big, gapping holes of poverty in the lives of your co-workers, your relatives and the people you do business with?
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