Are riches inside or outside?

I still battle with this every day. The temptation is still to view people with big cars, houses and families etc as being rich.

I was thinking this walking home last night. Someone drove past in their big car and I wondered wouldn't it be luxury to own a car and drive like that. At that moment I turned to corner into our road, which is at the top of a big hill with views for 40 miles. The thought of the car was obliterated by the view which I always enjoy, and I was reminded that walking has every bit of pleasure that driving has.

Last summer I wanted to take a cycle and I wanted to go bird watching. I decide to do both. It was strange because while I was cycling slowly along the country paths I saw no birds at all. I stopped to walk and instantly noticed birds in the trees. I stopped to sit by the canal and there saw even more birds. The scale of view is altered by each mode. In a car we see almost nothing, we are orientated toward arriving, but not the journey. If we want to arrive, then take motorised transport, but if we want to travel then walk.

The same goes for life. If we want to arrive then motorise, plan a streamline your life for purpose. If you want to live then walk.

Unfortunately people share their lives in the form of places they have been. The names count for a great deal, when in reality I suspect they are the same experience underneath. We may "do" a very great deal in life, but if we didn't travel then its a pointless journey I suspect.

Of course we could go to the other extreme and do nothing, watching TV or dreaming. I suspect this is just as vacuous as doing lots but not travelling.

Riches? Is the poor man who is content richer than the rich man who still wants more? As I child I learned that you only miss that which you have known. If you never knew about it you are free from it. That means we can treat the knowledge of new things with pleasure of displeasure, because new things give us new wishes and new loss of contentment.

If we could master our wishes, so that we wished what we wanted to wish then we would be able to free ourself from those wishes we cannot fulfill. That way contentment would be truely ours, rather than the fake contentment of temporarily having "achieved" what we wanted.

And "achieved", why is that so important. Many people will argue that the greatest pleasure is not the having, but the achieving of the something - the satisfaction that "we" proved potent, rather than impotent. Often people fight for things they don't want, because the object is the winning not the having.

This is ego. We are bound then to the eternal requirement to prove ourselves, to prove our existence through our ability to create change. Obviously change requires many people for starters, although some people like architects get to continue the delusion by having their names on buildings. If we look further however this is not our existence is it! Did we chose to define ourselves like this! or are we victim to an external measure imposed upon us. And, if there is a standard by which we measure ourselves - what is is measuring if not our already existence!

So we can discount "achievement" as important to riches, and we can discount the wishes that we achieve. So what then is richness? that I am still living on...