Why Do I Feel So Bad? (part 1) Money Matters

But in those rare moments when there is enough nature around me, at least some greenery, or perhaps someone watering a garden that could resemble the sound of a waterfall, I reflect – on myself, my life, life in general, and how I see things. Usually such moments are filled with a dark cloud of gloom, fear, complexity, and uncertainty which my mind flicks over to superficial niceties to avert further pain to the soul in man's crumbling mass of concrete jungles. Niceties like, what's for dinner, can't wait til the new TV arrives, wonder if Mum's going to let me go out this weekend…..

Reflection should be calming, shouldn't it? But when I do this I often feel overwhelmed by man's well, not sure what to call it, perhaps – mind-boggling ability to complicate simple matters – distorting the soul out of meanings, places, words, incidents, people, life, me…..And here I am left feeling perplexed and somehow lost in the midst of a multi-faceted sky-scraper of ambiguities, misnomers, and jargon.

When I rattle the change in my pocket or check my purse to see how much 'cash' is on hand, I experience this feeling of illusion; not feeling safe; do I have money really? Is this money – is it worth more than the bit of paper it's printed on? Isn't it so, that really I am simply a consumer in a producer process? My education has persuaded me that I really 'need' a lot of things; more than I do need in reality. So I work longer and longer hours following the bait of materialism; labor saving devices; Hmm comfort; the god of the modern age. I'm bombarded by advertisements telling me over and over again in every conceivable way that I'm not good enough; will never be good enough unless I wear such and such kind of clothes, eat at such and such restaurants, or copy whoever is the famous icon of the current day. So me, and everyone else I know, have been manipulated until most of our thoughts, talk, and work is directed towards getting more and more of this stuff they call 'money'. But most of the time, what I earn is just enough to live on so I dwell in frustration until I'm further persuaded to buy now and pay later and thus get caught up in the banking mire.

Modern man, me included, is encouraged to need, in fact, to want more money than we earn and to borrow the difference with friendly faces on all those adds, telling us how important we are, how 'you are the most important person in the world' and yes, most of us get conned by those smiles and sign our lives away. We spend the next how many years scrambling to pay the bills and in the end never have the time to really enjoy all those unnecessary commodities we've bought with that stuff they call money.

But getting back to that 'money' thing, it's a bit of a mystery really. After all, every country only has so much gold that's backing up the 'wealth' of the country and yet so much paper money is printed or kept digital (only existing as numbers on a computer). What on earth would happen if we all went to the bank and asked for all our money back? Only God knows. Better to think about what's for dinner…

Selma A. Cook is an Aussie Muslim writer who lives and works in Egypt.  She has written a number of books including: Buried Treasure (An Islamic novel for teenagers), The Light of Submission (Islamic Poetry). She has also edited and revised many Islamic books. She can be contacted at: youth_campaign@iolteam.com.