On trust, desire, and why money was never the real question.
Neale Donald Walsch, in Conversations with God, makes a claim that sounds simple until you sit with it long enough for it to unsettle you. That what we call wanting is not a signal of lack. It is a signal of recognition. We desire what we desire because somewhere in us we already know it belongs to our life.
Most people read that and nod and move on. It’s the kind of idea that feels true in the abstract and then gets quietly filed away under the pressure of practical life.
But I keep finding it confirmed in ways I can’t dismiss.
The Permission We Keep Waiting For
There’s something people say so often it has stopped sounding strange: I just want enough money to have choices.
It sounds like self-awareness. Like the person saying it knows they’re not chasing luxury, just options. Room to move.
But I think it’s a displacement. Not a lie exactly, more like a true feeling pointed in the wrong direction. Because the choices people are waiting for money to unlock, the ones that feel like they actually belong to their life, those are not being held back by their bank account. They’re being withheld by something else entirely. By the part of us that decided we needed something external before we could move toward what was already calling us.
The Sequence We’ve Accepted
We tend to assume it goes: security first, then purpose. Get stable, get safe, then leap.
But that’s not how it seems to work. Purpose doesn’t wait for conditions to be right. It applies pressure from inside, consistently, often at the most inconvenient moments. It doesn’t care about your bank account.
And what follows, including money, tends to arrive in the wake of the willingness to stop negotiating with that pressure. Not before it.
You can do the things you want to do. Not always in the exact shape you imagined, and sometimes it asks for creativity, for finding the door that’s actually open rather than pushing on the one that isn’t. But the choices appear. They tend to appear precisely when you stop waiting for conditions to be perfect and start moving anyway.
This isn’t an argument against money. We live in this world, in this society, at this particular moment in history, and money is real. It creates access. It makes impact possible in ways that matter. I’m not interested in romanticising scarcity.
But there is a difference between money as a tool and money as the gate we’re standing in front of, waiting for someone to open. One is practical. The other is a story with no ending.
What I Know From Having Leapt
I didn’t wait. When the pull came I followed it without the financial safety net I told myself I needed first. And things followed. Not perfectly, not without difficulty, but they followed. One way or another they always did.
We want things the way we want them, as if money needs to arrive first to make them possible. But if I truly want something, I will find a creative way toward it. Even without money. Possibilities are endless, and my bank account has never dictated what was possible for me to do or reach. Only my boldness, my trust, my confidence. I have always trusted, and I have always received. Not in the easy, comfortable ways. I have to stretch myself. But that is the way of it. Sometimes it is challenging. It is also, in the same breath, incredibly liberating. Maybe not first class. But when has comfort ever been a friend to growth?
Our life has been dotted with thousands of moments I don’t quite know how to name. Moments where what was needed arrived not because we planned for it, but because something in us already knew it was coming.
My son is perhaps the clearest mirror of this I have. He went to the pool recently and tried a pair of small swimming goggles someone lent him. He loved them, and something inside him simply settled into knowing he would have them. No anxiety. No strategy. Just an inner certainty that what he wanted was already finding its way to him.
That day he found nose clips on his way out of the pool.
The next day, at the bottom of a lake we had been swimming in, he found a pair of swimming goggles.
In the space of twenty four hours the universe delivered exactly what he had opened himself to. Money never truly entered his mind. His desire never became a source of stress. It became something he simply trusted.
“The deepest secret is that life is not a process of discovery, but a process of creation. You are not discovering yourself, but creating yourself anew.” Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God
What We’re Actually Being Held To
If money feels like the thing holding us back, I don’t think we’re being held back at all. I think we’re being held to something. A direction. A pull that doesn’t negotiate and doesn’t wait.
The astonishing thing, the thing I keep witnessing in my own life and in my son’s, is that when you stop treating that pull as something to be earned or afforded first, the world has a way of organising itself around it.