You’ve allowed money to override love!

Last week, a cousin of mine visited me from Germany. We used to be very close before he left the country. Every time I was in Mzuzu for holidays during my university days, we would be spotted everywhere together.

But these days, we hardly talk on the phone apart from the usual Facebook links. When he came, we spent almost the whole night talking until dawn.

As we left the lounge for our beds in the morning, my cousin said “You know, the problem these days is we spend too much of our time chasing money and forget our loved ones in the process. Look, we have a lot to catch-up on because we don’t have much time to talk when we are apart.”

I went to bed, but my cousin’s words kept echoing in my ears for a whole 30 minutes or more.

You see, there are two things I know for sure money can’t buy:  Time and happiness.

Money can’t buy back time. Every night, when your head hits the pillow, you’ve just spent another day of your life. Did you tell your wife that you love her? Did you hug your child? Did you find out how your parents are doing? Did you go for jogging with your child just to feel the wind in your hair while you laugh together?

So often we skip these things in the pursuit of money, but years later, it is not the chase for money that we remember. It is these people that have been in our life who we neglected and took for granted that we will remember.

Money can’t buy lasting happiness. If you woke up in the morning and found that your parents had passed away, would you feel any regrets? Is there any amount of money that would replace those regrets? What about your husband or your wife or your child?

Money is not the goal of life. Money is only a tool to help us live our lives, to enable us to find room for the things that money can’t buy. Take care lest you reverse the priorities. Remember, we don’t work for money as an end in itself but to use money as a tool to make our families (nucleus and extended) happy.

Sometime today, tell someone important to you that you love them. That one moment that it takes to tell someone how you really feel about them is more valuable than anything else you could be doing in that moment.