Poverty

It’s delightful to have pretty, high-quality material things in your life. They all bring a smile of satisfaction to your face. The smile lasts for a while, but it very quickly fades, like a candle which lights up a room as long as its wick is new. After it burns out, the light disappears.
That’s how it is with you too. Your smile shines upon all your material possessions as long as they can be shown to your friends and neighbors, as long as everyone you know and everyone you don’t know looks to see what new things you have. After that, the light goes out, and it comes back again only when an entirely new object pulls you in with its shine and stirs within you the desire to own it.
And that’s when you experience poverty; that’s where emptiness appears to you, and real happiness is lost because you only really need a few of the things which surround you—only a few of them really awaken within you true and profound happiness. Everything else is just transient, things which you will only occasionally think of in the years to come.
The only true riches are the ones you always have with you; they cannot disappear no matter what, and nobody can take them away from you. Your soul, your happiness which arises from it, peace, warmth…those are the only real riches you have. These are the only riches you’re born with, and it is with them that you die, in this life and in all others.
To really grow rich in this lifetime would be to work on that one true treasure: to work on yourself, on everything you are and everything you want to be. And that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t own material things too, even a multitude of them if opportunities to do so present themselves in this lifetime. It means you shouldn’t guide your soul towards material possessions, but rather wait to see if they’ll enter your life. If they do, they’re part of the game in this lifetime and among your teachers along the way. In that case, you should accept the material possessions and see what they’ve come to teach you. But if they’re not there, pining for them would be the ultimate mistake because material possessions are not meant to be your teachers in this life; you don’t need them, and so why would you forcefully change the path you mapped out for yourself long ago? The more relaxed, happy, and at peace you are with that one treasure you have, the more everything around you—your life—will evolve in the direction it needs to go. That way, you can be sure that everything that comes into your life comes with a purpose, and everything that isn’t there is missing because that’s how it’s supposed to be, for reasons which only you can ever know—if you try hard enough to find your path, the way which you and your life are unfolding.