Planning is not about planning what to do tomorrow. Planning is deciding what to do today to get what you want tomorrow. Learn to say yes to change. It's easier to give birth than to say yes. He suffers from a syndrome that is well described in anecdote. Young

To be a master of the "ideal style" means to forget about the apology The ninth most unfortunate way to start your speech - an apology - is so unfortunate that it deserves a separate section. It amazes me how often speakers begin to crumble into

What does it mean to be rich? Is it easy? Such questions began to come to my mind rather late. Early childhood and youth were spent in poverty, that is, among unpainted floors, bare walls, windows littered with thick ice in winter, overshadowed by white-gray fringe, hard plank beds, patchwork quilts, homespun rugs. If I had to read in books: “the courtiers were dressed to the nines”, then this “down and out” seemed to me in the form of white and fluffy sweaters, and nothing more. When I happened to see luxurious rooms, halls where capitalists and landowners lived in the cinema, I thought about who cleans everything there: washes the floors, windows, doors. How many servants were needed to keep such a room in order. As a rule, servants were not often shown in the cinema, and then only so that they would say to their masters: "Dinner is served."
Everything in our life was different. Our home is a small room in a communal apartment. The kitchen, bathroom, toilet and corridor in this apartment served several families. But what kind of flies, bedbugs, lice and cockroaches we had, well-fed, satisfied with their existence, not striving for any heights. God! What we just did not do to get rid of them. They stained with dust, poured boiling water over them, crushed them with their hands ... It was especially pleasant to crush the lice. It used to happen that you spread a newspaper on the table and you start combing your head over it with a frequent comb, and they, damned, fall so hard and loudly on the newspaper. Here you crush them with your fingernail. Chitin bursts with a bang. Beauty, and more! Do not be horrified, reader. Neat people lived in our communal apartment, but in the apartment of my school friend, Galka Filippova, the tenants basically did not follow cleanliness. Nobody wanted to do anything for others. There, flies hovered in clouds over the heads of the residents. I'm not talking about public spaces. I can only say that when Galkina's mother invited me to dine with them, I ran home. I remember that a lonely young woman lived in this apartment in a tiny room. I don't know how she got on, but I never saw her in the kitchen.
However, the years went by. And we overcame difficulties with honor. Insects have disappeared from our lives. I finally got rid of lice at adolescence, and then thanks to our class teacher. She advised me to buy a glass of cranberries at the market, mash them and smear cranberry juice on my head. I did just that: I bought it, kneaded it, smeared it, tied a scarf around my head and walked around the apartment like that for several hours. A neighbor saw me and asked: “Ira, did you dye your hair?” I nodded my head. She looked at me so respectfully, as if I had been canonized as a saint.
I saw the last cockroach in my apartment (I already had a separate two-room apartment) much later. It happened when my son made repairs in the apartment. The floor was replaced, the ceilings too, the windows, radiators, plumbing were changed. Everything was new, made of plastic. The walls in the kitchen and bathroom were tiled. There was nothing left of the former existence with lime and oil paint. A cockroach wandered into us after repairs (obviously, a scout), looked, thought, left and did not appear again. And the bugs and flies themselves were removed somewhere long before the repair. After all that I had experienced, I came to the conclusion: bedbugs love the sick, lice love the hungry, cockroaches and flies love all sorts of loopholes, cracks, crevices. That is, they are all a product of poverty. However, my neighbor in the country, Lilya, says otherwise. Ecology is the reason. The insects have disappeared, and after them we will leave. Creepy, isn't it?! Is prosperity worth enjoying if you have to pay so dearly for it? Or maybe you shouldn't think about it? What for? After all, this way you can come to the conclusion that wars, repressions, obscurantism are not such a bad thing. Pip on my tongue! Fuck me, fuck me! Forgive me, Lord, and all who live in this world.
And yet, what does it mean to be rich? Our family always, even before I was born, had a small plot of land. Vegetables grew there: potatoes, carrots, beets, etc. Otherwise, it was impossible to survive everything that fell to our lot. So it was in my native Achinsk. In Krasnoyarsk, where fate threw us in 1950, my older brother took a piece of land, 6 acres, outside the city. O! If you knew what kind of land it was! Grey, dusty, hard as stone. Rare weeds with difficulty made their way through its thickness and felt deeply unhappy. And so my mother and I undertook to nurse this abandoned inconvenience. There was a road near our site. And behind the road stretched an ancient beam. A stream flowed along its bottom, protected from the outside world by lush, abundant bushes. Lush grass grew on the slopes of the ravine, and thin birch trees could be seen here and there. Cows and horses often grazed there. My mother and I went there with bags to collect cow cakes and horse apples. The cows calmly looked at us, not seeing anything reprehensible in our actions, but the horses were perplexed. They looked at us puzzled and, of course, thought: “Oh my God, how far people can go!”.
In short, in four years, in four summer seasons, we revived our site, and it began to give out in such quantity and quality that I became proud. I began to brag to my girlfriends about our achievements in the field Agriculture. Once I heard in response: “Oh, yes, it’s time to dispossess you!”. I immediately bit my tongue. I realized: you can’t show your joy, your well-being, your love for work, for all living things. This can have bad consequences.
And yet we were rich. With my first paycheck, I bought an orange blouse, a black skirt, and green high-heeled shoes. When I first showed up in the courtyard of our house in my new clothes, the neighbor's boy shouted, pointing his finger at me: “Dandy! The dude is coming!" I showed him my fist, and in my heart I rejoiced. It seemed to me that I had risen to the highest level of my material perfection.
All this is very good. But it is strange that I do not remember the feeling of hunger that I should have experienced in post-war years. I remember that we, children, chewed all sorts of rubbish: var, salt, green rolls. (I think they were milky seed pods of some kind of herbaceous vegetation). What is hunger, I realized later, when the food became better. I, perhaps, still can not get used to the fact that the food has become better. I remember one day our daughter-in-law, the wife of my older brother, Lida, brought home a bunch of green onions, chopped them, ate them, and then rolled around on the bed in a fit of severe pain. It was, I think, 1952. Our daughter-in-law is an amazingly beautiful woman. Marlene Dietrich - a languid beauty with plucked eyebrows - could not compare with her beauty. But Lydia Ivanovna's fate was different, completely different. She tried with all her might to improve her life, to decorate it: she studied, worked, drew well, but, alas, she had neither fur coats, nor famous friends, nor fame, nor fame. She has been gone for fifteen years now.
Why do I still not remember the feeling of hunger? Maybe because everything is comprehended in comparison: both grief and joy. I have been hungry since birth. I didn't know what it meant to be full. And since she didn’t know, she didn’t suffer from hunger. I’ll stuff something into my mouth: var, salt, a piece of clay, edible grass - and order, a simple matter. And I got off of it relatively easily: just gastritis, frequent fainting and poor school performance. Only in the Khrushchev period, when the stores were filled with food, did I get rid of these troubles, and, finally, I understood what it means to be hungry.
And the years, as you know, went on and on. Just think, only at the age of 36 I moved from a communal apartment to a separate two-room apartment. I got it by a lucky coincidence. The circumstances, of course, were unfortunate, but not for me. I was just very lucky back then. Further more. My adult son took and bought a four-room apartment in a new house. Four rooms, a huge kitchen, a full-length loggia, a corridor - it was too much for me. However, soon my daughter-in-law (son's wife) began to complain that cleaning and mopping took up a lot of time from her. “I used to wash the floor in a two-room apartment in half an hour, but now I need two hours,” she said. Then a car called "Pickup" appeared. Dear infection! But how powerful! She can move in water at a depth of one meter, climb a steep slope like a bug on a wall, and what a beauty when she is washed: dazzling white - you won’t take your eyes off. And what? Again dissatisfaction. Joy from all this real estate is not enough. At first, for sure - delight, like on a honeymoon. And then other thoughts come to mind. Oh, so you fail! It is necessary, twice a year, to change tires, take it for inspection, keep it in order, wash it. And how much diesel fuel she eats - you won’t get enough. In a word, there are enough worries. They also bought a dacha in addition to the one that we already had from pre-perestroika times. The places are painfully beautiful there - Astafevsky. Near the river Mana, the monastery, the rocky bank of Mana, overgrown with coniferous forest (for which he was hooked there, because the rocks are ...), a white cross painted on an exposed piece of rock, the calm flow of the toiler Mana, blissful silence, a quiet splash of water, overflows of solar lights on the tops of pine trees, and gray clouds with dazzling white lining, floating across the blue sky.
All this is very good, but back to the dacha. You need to mow the grass, you need to take care of the garden, you need to repair something, build something ... - you spin all day, spin, and there is no time to think about whether I am happy or not. I remember when the perestroika boom had already subsided and sobering up began, my son said to me with sadness in his voice: “Mom, if I had been born ten years earlier, I would now be a very rich person.” I answered him this: “My dear, you would have been killed. Do you really think that all these gentlemen would let you into the perestroika trough? And there is no need, there is no need for any millions with which the newly appeared prophets fool the heads of gullible simpletons. We have something that I didn’t even dare to dream about, and couldn’t because of my unpreparedness: apartments, summer cottages, a car. Enough. The most valuable thing is the land, and what grows on it. In any case, if we are alive, we will not be lost. My dear son, if you want to be rich, don't be greedy; if you want to be happy, don't be selfish. Of course, there is reason to think, there is something to be sad about. Sometimes it seems to me, when I look at the world around me, that the nuclear catastrophe that science fiction writers write about has already happened. How some people, seemingly smart, educated, who have climbed to the heights of culture, science, power, suddenly began to become stupid in front of our eyes, to become demoralized. So, in fact, trouble cannot be avoided. What other experiences and shocks are needed to calm them down? My son, honor the commandments of God, do not succumb to the temptations of the evil one, everything will be fine.

Every person in the depths of his soul dreams of becoming rich, so as not to think about tomorrow and live for his own pleasure. But what is wealth? Do people correctly interpret this concept? And is it only material goods that are meant by this word? Perhaps the category of wealth is not as narrow as it is commonly believed in society?

The meaning of the concept of "wealth"

There are many definitions of this term. So, wealth can be understood as financial security or as the breadth of the possibilities of the human mind and body, nobility, the ability to compassion, kindness and many other spiritual qualities. Wealth is, on the one hand, a large number of all kinds of material goods a person has that contribute to a comfortable life. In this sense, this term is usually synonymous with the income of a member of society, which allows him to spend a lot of money on the image and acquisition

On the other hand, wealth is its intellectual capital, variety of emotions and various positive traits. In this sense, the term is not tied to any material objects, be it money or the attributes of a luxurious life (luxurious houses, yachts, designer items, etc.). Wealth becomes something that cannot be seen at first sight, without penetrating into the essence of human nature.

Synonyms for "wealth"

Synonyms for the word "wealth" basically describe this term from the material side. So, the most common synonymous concept is "luxury". Luxury is a person's possession of expensive items of clothing, things that raise prestige in society and increase the level of social status. This word means only material goods, which are designed to make a person's life more comfortable.

Another synonym is abundance. Abundance means a huge, innumerable amount of something. This concept, of course, can describe both the material and spiritual viability of a person, but more often it is still used to characterize monetary income.

The word "prosperity" can also in some cases be wealth. This happens if we are talking about something inanimate (city, area, field, region, etc.). The phrase "thriving city", for example, can describe locality with high level people's lives, favorable conditions for its development.

Antonyms for the word "wealth"

The lexical meaning of the word "wealth" can also be explained through antonyms. So, the most common of them - "poverty". This word can be understood as the absence Money to create comfortable conditions for life, and a narrow outlook, the scarcity of spiritual qualities.

Another antonym is "poverty". This word describes the worse material and spiritual condition of a person than poverty. And again, this term describes the external and internal spheres of the life of society and its individual members.

Another antonym of wealth is need. This word speaks for itself. It includes in its meaning the concept that a person lacks something for a comfortable, well-fed life, that his income is too small to purchase expensive household items, prestigious clothing models, technical innovations, etc.

Symbols of wealth

In human culture, fairly stable ideas about wealth have developed. Depending on the customs and traditions of each particular people, certain symbols and talismans have appeared that help to attract prosperity and well-being to the house.

Especially widely the theme of wealth is revealed in Eastern cultures. For example, in China, the feng shui flow explains not only which talismans need to be kept in the house to attract wealth and good luck, but also how they should be located so that the energies of water, air, fire and earth are not extinguished. So, the symbol of wealth in China is - is the character of the same name. It is believed that this image must be placed next to money so that their number multiplies and increases, for example, draw on a wallet, put a piece of paper with such a pattern in a safe, and also next to valuables (in a jewelry box or with important papers). Another talisman of the Celestial Empire is coins with square slots. It must be hung on a string in the house or worn around the neck. A toad with a coin in its mouth will also help attract wealth. According to Feng Shui, you need to place several figures in each room in the southeast with their backs to the entrance. This will give the illusion that the toad has just jumped into the room and brought money with it.

In Russian culture, there is also a symbol of wealth. This is a horseshoe that is traditionally hung over front door. It is believed that this talisman brings wealth, happiness and good luck to the house, and also drives away evil spirits that spoil things and people's relationships.

gods of wealth

Eastern peoples worship a large number of gods that can give people prosperity, wealth and happiness. In Indian mythology, the god of wealth is Kubera. This deity not only increases wealth, but also keeps the secrets of underground treasures and precious metals.

Which god to worship depends not only on the preferences of each person, but also on what zodiac sign he was born under and in what year eastern horoscope. So, the Buddhist deity Dzambala is recommended to pray to people who were born in the year of the Rooster or Monkey.

In ancient Greek mythology, the god of wealth is Plutos. He was brought up from early childhood by two goddesses: Tyche and Eirena. Plutus brings prosperity and profit only to those who work hard. He himself did not know how to properly manage material wealth, for which he was punished by the supreme god of the Greeks Zeus.

sayings about wealth

Many great people have mentioned wealth in their quotes. These are quotes filled with deep meaning. “The greatest wealth is to live and be content with little,” the Greek poet and writer Plato said about prosperity. This statement can be interpreted as follows: desiring a lot, a person becomes greedy and ceases to appreciate what he already has.

“All wealth is a product of labor”, - this is how John Locke, an English philosopher, described luxury and abundance. From his quote it is clear that a great material fortune cannot be achieved without effort. Nothing in life comes easy.

Wealth as a material category

The first meaning of the word wealth is the presence of material goods, namely money. A large number of monetary units allows a person not to think about what to buy, what to eat, where to relax. On the other hand, wealth does not have to be selfish. For example, many famous people donate a lot of money to charity, help international organizations, send them to zones of armed conflicts. All these are examples of how wealth can serve the benefit of the whole society, and not an individual.

Wealth as a spiritual category

The material component is only a small part of what is included in the concept of "wealth". It is also the ability and desire to do good deeds, extensive knowledge in various areas of life, high moral principles and strong moral principles. This is what every person should really strive for, not limited to narrow ideas about wealth as a pile of money that can be thoughtlessly spent left and right on all sorts of pleasures.