Flowergirl

✿✽❀~ fourteen ~❀✽✿

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Wealth and Forgiveness Live Hand in Hand

Being wealthy. How can one define a term such as wealth, when to each person, it means a different thing? There is, of course, the obvious: monetary wealth. And it is clear to me how—especially in a place of business—forgiveness (but not forgetting) can play a role in helping someone become wealthier. After all, holding grudges in a workplace only weakens one's network, limiting both their resources and their opportunities. After looking past monetary wealth though, it becomes clear that there are so many other ways for a person to be able to claim that they are wealthy.

There is wealth of knowledge, in which a person grows wealthy from the things they learn and retain to apply in their lives. There is also wealth in relationships, strong and mutual companionships that add substantial value to both lives. There is wealth in being healthy and active, in feeling good in one's own skin, even in seizing the day. I wholeheartedly believe that there is a way to find wealth in everything one might do in their day to day lives, if only they would look for it.

Recently though, I have discovered a new kind of wealth that I had not known in all my eighteen years: wealth of self. The wealth that comes from knowing who I am. Not just feeling comfortable in my skin or loving myself, but in truly knowing myself. Knowing what I want, what my ambitions are, how far I am willing to go to achieve those ambitions. The everchanging process of growing and honing my wealth of self has really opened my eyes. I have realised that there is a domino effect to this whole system. If I know who I am and what I want, and I am comfortable enough with myself to fight for what I want, then everything else falls into place. I will learn through my experiences (wealth of knowledge), I will cultivate new relationships that I would not have made otherwise (wealth of relationships), and most importantly, I will learn to accept myself despite my failures. If I could do this, my life would be rich. My life would be wealthy.

I hope that turning in this essay will be the first step toward embarking on this journey to gain wealth of self. Being able to admit to myself that I have been living in my own shadow, using my very own body to shield myself from opportunity, brings along the realisation that I also have the power to lift myself up into opportunity's reach. If I have been holding myself back, then I can also cause myself to shine.

This Saturday, I will be putting my words to the test. I will try, and I will fight for the one thing that scares me the most, but also the one thing that I want more than anything else. Ruth Renkel once said that ‎"sometimes the poorest man leaves his children the richest inheritance." My mum's father, coming to Australia as a Korean immigrant, did not have much as far as monetary wealth goes, and I never got to meet him, but my mum has told me stories about him. I know that he was an intelligent, hardworking, family loving, and culture appreciative man. My mum learnt so much from him from the way he embraced this new country despite not having the best English, the way he would do everything in his power to make sure that even though she was growing up in Australia and her mum was Australian too, she would also remember that she was Korean as well and would love both parts of herself equally. So even though my mother didn't grow up with lots of new toys or fancy clothing, she grew up speaking two languages, she grew with two vastly different families, and she grew up with both her mother and her father's cultures. Today, she is well rounded enough to have taught me the values and importance of hard work, a good attitude, and forgiveness. She has left me with a richer inheritance than she knows, and by forgiving myself for my past mistakes, I allow myself to move forward and grow my wealth. I now have hope, and as far as I am concerned, as long as I hold on to that, I am wealthy.