sky to heaven - the invisible life.

I live in a country where money is valued above nearly all other possessions, and I have heard many stories of parents who want to leave their children with money. They work hard to make money to support their family and to prepare for the future, so that their children can have an easier life. They believe money is the path to freedom and happiness - that money is the key to a better future and a better life. And because they think money is so valuable, they think money is the best inheritance they can pass on to their children.

But I believe otherwise. A parent who leaves their children with money does not leave their children with happiness or a better future – but leaves them only with money. Money is a very temporary thing; for it can be easily spent, lost in poor investments, stolen, or cheated away by people more clever than your child. A parent can spend their whole life to make a fortune, and after they pass it on to their children it can be gone in a blink of an eye. Of all the great gifts a parent can give to their child, I believe money is the least valuable and the least permanent.

For one day, you will not be there to give them any more money. One day an accident, an earthquake, or cancer may happen – and that day may come at any time. What will your family do then? And even if you are still here, many other negative events may occur. The economy may collapse. You may lose your job. You may go bankrupt. A natural disaster may wipe out your assets. You will live, but you will no longer have any money or an income. One day you may find yourself in poverty, and you cannot buy your way out of poverty. What will you and your family do then?

You may know the parable of the hungry man and the fisherman. A hungry man asks a fisherman for a fish, and the fisherman says, “If I give you a fish, you will always come back to me when you are hungry. You will depend on me for your survival. No, I will not give you any fish at all - better that I teach you how to catch fish, so that you will never be hungry again.”

The lesson is clear: knowing how to make money is more important than money itself. So if you wish for your child to have all the things that money can buy, then do not just give them money – give them the knowledge of how to make money, and cultivate within them the abilities necessary to make money. And give them also the knowledge of how to save and grow money, and how to spend money wisely. Because simply giving your child money is not the best way to help prepare your child to survive in this world.

But you cannot give what you do not have, and you cannot teach what you do not know. Perhaps you do not possess the knowledge of how to make money. And I believe that most of us do not possess such knowledge – because if we really did know how to make money, we would all be making much more of it than we do now. We would be sitting on tons of cash. We wouldn’t even worry about money – because we would always know how to make it. We would always feel secure in our ability to make money. Most of us do know how to perform a particular job that may earn a paycheck of $X every month, but that is not the same thing at all as knowing how to really make money. This is why most people are afraid of losing their jobs – because they do not know how to make money without that job. No wonder one or both of your parents felt financial pressure to make money to support the family – no wonder you feel pressure to do the same thing.

A friend of mine recently asked me, “If you could only choose one, which one would you rather have: riches or wisdom?”
And I said, “Of course, wisdom.”
“Why?”
“Because if you have wisdom, you can always make money. But if one day, you lose all your money and you don’t have any wisdom, then what are you going to do? You’ll be, pardon my language - screwed.” I believe wisdom is not only a great asset in one’s own personal life, but also a valuable asset in the global economy. Many would hire the services of a wise person - but no one wishes to hire a fool.

But even the knowledge of how to make money is a lesser asset, in my opinion, compared to the knowledge of how to create happiness. For in our life and in our world, we may encounter many diverse trials and failures, difficulties and disasters, horrors and tragedies – wars, natural catastrophes, accidents, rape, cancer, crime, illness, betrayal, abuse, isolation, the death of a loved one, and unemployment, just to name a few. One or many of these events may happen to you – and money may be of little use in such situations. Such experiences and events have regularly occurred throughout the course of human history, and they continue to occur in the lives of many human beings today. In this kind of world, knowing how to be happy is a valuable ability to have if one is to move forward from negative events.

For the test of any individual person is not how well they succeed and make money in prosperous times, but how they respond to failure and lift themselves up in times of hardship – and those hard times will come in due course, for such is the cycle of life. This is why I believe a person who possesses wisdom and can create happiness, is in an infinitely better position in life than a person who can only create money. And I believe that most of us also do not possess the knowledge of creating happiness, either – for if we did, most of us would be much happier than we are now. We all wish for happiness, and we all wish for our children to be happy. But that’s just it - we only wish it, but we don’t necessarily teach them how. And we can’t teach them how, because we don’t know how to be happy, either. So we just tell them, “Go get a job and make some money,” or “Do whatever you want,” because “I just want you to be happy.”

And the reason why we do not possess such knowledge, is because our parents did not possess such knowledge either. Knowledge gets handed down through generations – but so does ignorance. And our ignorance is understandable, since our schools and societies do not emphasize things such as “wisdom” or “happiness.” We all tend to value money more than happiness or wisdom, because we believe that we need money in order to be happy. But I believe that it is far better to learn how to be happy and wise, and to move forward from there to making money.

So if you would give the best to your children, consider that money is not the only asset and inheritance you can pass on to them – and it may not even be the best one, either. But as I have said, you cannot give what you do not have, and you cannot teach what you do not know. You must first possess wisdom and happiness yourself before you can pass them on to your children. It is unlikely they will learn such things in school, for if such things were taught in school, then we would have a flood of wise and happy students graduating from our schools - which is obviously not the case. It is also unlikely that they will learn such things from their friends, who are mostly as young and inexperienced as your own child. Which leaves only you – their first and primary role model in life. So if you do not possess wisdom or happiness, then you may wish to consider cultivating them inside yourself – for your children’s sake, as well as your own. In times of crisis, their survival may depend on it. And their happiness does depend on it.