What if our currency wasn’t pounds and pennies? What if we didn’t race to fill our coffers with gold, or buy endless plastic trash we don’t need or to strut our success in clothes, cars and holidays?

What if our currency was compassion?

And what if we were compelled, compelled not by a faceless authority but compelled by a desire so strong it could not be stopped … compelled by this desire to spend compassion everywhere?

We would shower compassion all over the world. When we walked we would talk with compassion to the trees and birds; with our neighbours we would fill up buckets that lie empty in the garage, we’d fill them up with compassion and share them freely. Compassion would swirl like the autumn leaves in a storm spinning through the air, never ending and always replenished.

What if we didn’t slog at jobs? What if we didn’t wake bleary-eyed to a wailing alarm? What if we didn’t trudge with heavy hearts to computer-jobs of pinging emails and 2-dimensional people, flattened by the meaninglessness that parades itself as work? What if, rather than jobs we awoke with the sun and found our hearts singing and guiding us to whatever we needed that day?

We would plant and harvest, we would care for our elderly neighbours and invite them to tea and listen to their stories. We would play with the children and get mud on our knees and plunge our hands in sticky clay and take out paint brushes and splash rainbow colours on canvas. We would listen and laugh and play.

What if musicians created music and philosophers contemplated questions and the mystics communicated with spirits and parents dove deep into the joys and tears and heartache of parenthood?

What if we unchained ourselves from jobs that fed the machine of society and instead danced, barefoot in the moonlight?

What if we stopped talking and shouting? What if rather than feeding our opinions on news and politics and rather than angrily typing and squashing others on social media … what if we stopped berating politicians with our sharpened tongues and we stopped shaking our angry fists at the world and all those who stood against us?

What if instead we listened?

What if we sat and heard the heartbreak of young love and the sorrow of aching grief? What if we sat curiously with the young as they unfurled their imagination? What if we sat in cafes and listened? We listened to the hidden life-energy of our souls and we listened to this stillness. What if we listened from this stillness to the wisdom and stories of hunched old men and frowning young women and quick-witted teenagers and laughing children and those weighted with worry.

What if we listened and released the pent-up stories that long to be heard … and in the hearing of those stories and by listening to others — we allow them to touch base with the river of stillness within.