Air quality, the soul of money, and Disney songs
Hiyo from Bangkok!
I have been having a lot of mangoes, guavas, and custard apples.
Here are some recent tidbits on my mind.
Air quality
When I stepped outside of my home this morning, I found it hard to breathe. It was not surprising. Our pocket air quality detector read (85.0 µg/m³) PM2.5 pollution at the time.
It makes the environmental consequences of our society's decision pretty clear. Soon, "free as air" might not hold true anymore. The concerning part is that we need air more than anything to survive. If the air pollution situation doesn't improve, the market for fresh air will surely grow. (People are already buying fresh air in a can anyway).
The air pollution doesn't only affect our health but also our cognitive functions. How much air pollution is going to expand our economic gap when such an essential "free" resource gets commoditized?
The soul of money
On my flight back to Thailand, I finished The Soul of Money. It is a book about living consciously and joyfully in our relationship with money.
Lynne Twist has been working on alleviating poverty for more than 40 years. She has seen the relationships between money and people from the poorest to the extremely rich.
My main takeaway from the book is the concept of sufficiency as opposed to scarcity.
Sufficiency is not a message about simplicity or about cutting back and lowering expectations. Sufficiency doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive or aspire. Sufficiency is an act of generating, distinguishing, making known to ourselves the power and presence of our existing resources, and our inner resources. Sufficiency is a context we bring forth from within that reminds us that if we look around us and within ourselves, we will find what we need. There is always enough.
When we know that we are enough, the world suddenly becomes abundant. In other words, the opposite of scarcity is not abundance. It is sufficiency, which itself is a basis for abundance.
She also suggests there are the right way and the wrong way to use money.
In our relationship with money, it is using money in a way that expresses our integrity; using it in a way that expresses value rather than determines value.
I have become fascinated with the concept of money recently.
Others on my reading list on this topic are The Ascent of Money, The End of Alchemy, and The Wisdom of Finance.
Disney songs
I am not ashamed to admit that Disney songs are my go-to karaoke songs (current favorites: Hakunamatata, I'll make a man out of you).
Jimmy Fallon's History of Disney Songs prompts me to look up how many of them are there. According to the Disney songs in chronological order playlist, there are at least 300.
I wonder how long it would take to sing them all.
Hope you have a great week! Until next Tuesday. :)