Dear soul,

If money disappeared, who would you be?

What would you wake up for if your existence had already been provided for? If you knew you would eat. If you knew you had somewhere safe to sleep. If learning, care, movement and enjoyment were available to you.

What would you do with a morning that belonged to you?

Perhaps you would sleep first.

Sleep through the exhaustion you have been calling ambition. Let your shoulders come down. Take the time to discover how much of your life has been spent preparing for something to go wrong.

And after you rested?

After you could finally breathe without calculating what that breath would cost you later?

What would begin asking to exist through you?

Would you grow something? Build something? Learn an instrument you have spent years walking past? Would you sit beside someone long enough to hear what they have never had time to say?

Would you discover that you love teaching, once teaching no longer means exhausting yourself? That you love creating, once every creation does not have to justify itself with a price?

What would you study without first asking whether it pays?

What would you make without wondering whether it sells?

Who would you become if becoming did not require permission from your bank account?

I want to meet that person.

The one who existed before you learned to introduce yourself through an occupation. The one whose curiosity reached for the world before someone asked what career it would lead to.

Where did you put them?

Are they still there, waiting inside the things you say you will do when you can afford to live?

Dear soul, what is your existence about beyond money?

You have a capacity to notice that nobody else carries in quite the same way. You have questions, experiences, instincts, a particular way of bringing things together. There are things you might discover simply because you stayed with a question someone else walked past.

What happens to those possibilities when your whole life is occupied by securing the next month?

And what could happen if we gave them room?

You might find that your purpose changes. That you need years to explore something. That some days your contribution is an invention, and other days it is preparing food for the people beside you.

There would still be a world to care for.

Food to grow. Water to protect. Homes to maintain. Children to nurture. People to accompany through pain. Things to understand, repair and create.

If your needs were met, how would you participate in meeting life?

What responsibility would you willingly take because you could see its meaning? What would you become good at because you cared about what happened when it was done well?

Would you still want to lead? What would you lead us towards?

Would you still want to build? What would deserve the materials, the land, the hours of human life?

Would you still want to be admired? What would you hope people saw in you?

Without a price to announce importance, how would you recognise value?

Perhaps through the person who feels safe beside you. Through the garden that keeps feeding people. Through an idea that makes a difficult task gentler. Through the care with which something survives in your hands.

Perhaps you would discover how much you have already given that money has never known how to count.

Your patience. Your attention. Your humour in a room that needed relief. The times you stayed. The things you understood. The beauty you noticed and helped someone else see.

You are allowed to have an existence that reaches beyond earning your place here.

So imagine it for a moment.

Your needs are met. You have time. Around you are other human beings discovering what they can bring into a life they share.

The morning arrives.

Who are you going to be in it?

With love,
Susan Ndinga Wright
SHS – Human First