Can I Get You a Cart?

This morning I detoured to make a quick trip to Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Knowing that all I needed was a lingeree bag (needed, yes, needed!), I didn’t take a cart. I headed straight toward the lingeree bag section (I knew just where it would be, having bought one for a friend a couple weeks ago) stopping only to grab a duo pack of longneck lighters—which I need—I mean need!—because I light a lot of longneck votive candles, and the price was right.

Have you been to B,B,B lately? I have been there a few times in the last year and noticed that the employees have been instructed to greet the heck out of people. Every employee is also a greeter, and they do well—more than once I have looked up because I thought someone I actually knew was saying hi to me. Today they took it a step further. Three employees—this store seems fabulously overstaffed—asked me if they could get me a cart, or a basket. Clearly, hanging on to my lighter and lingeree bag gave me no hands free to buy a big-ticket bulky item, like a down comforter. I was torn between being offended and flattered by how much these folks wanted to help me buy more stuff. It was like being in another world, a world where these people don’t realize that we don’t need all this crap!

Sometimes I get mixed messages--buy!-don’t buy!--but I am leaning toward not buying. I am leaning toward getting more gratification from the few things I do buy, and not looking at all the things I don’t have (B,B,B is full of them! Chock full! It is the most stocked store I’ve been to in a long time!). On one hand, I have heard that, supposedly, buying things keeps our economy going, but I believe that is WAY short-sighted. Both the lingeree bag and the lighters were packaged in both cardboard and plastic. Those lighters are destined to make some pretty crappy landfill. And buying more stuff may stimulate the economy temporarily but from a more expanded perspective, it is UNsustainable; all this trash has to go somewhere. But I digress.

I look around at the world in its present state and see the nightmarish state of the US economy not as an economic crisis but as a personal call to create abundance INTERNALLY. To feed my spirit, not my desire for stuff. I ask: What is this situation telling me? Whenever some minor crisis happens in my own life, I ask the question why…from an expanded perspective, why is this happening? From a metaphoric perspective, what does it mean? I always receive an answer, and it's never the one western medicine or newspaper editorials offer. For this major crisis we are sharing as a nation…this awakening to the fact that our economy is a house of cards, that our capitalist indoctrination to buy more stuff has become unsustainable…I also ask the question why. Why?

Because it is time! It is time for us as a planet, us as humanity-- not We the People of the U.S., though including US--to wake up! Wake up, internally, wake up out of the daily grind of working on a “job” that is not entirely fulfilling but which allows an ample number of flat-screen tv’s and cars and cell phones—the necessities of life that we all "need." Wake up out of a treadmill-like sleepwalk. The economy is telling me to rebalance, or it will rebalance FOR me...and it won't be pleasant.

Really? What if? What if we woke up out of the sleepwalk, woke to a higher calling within. If you had a higher calling, what would it be? If money were no object, and the lack thereof wouldn’t keep you from enjoying a high standard of living, what would that calling be? What would feed your spirit and contribute to the highest good of all concerned, even if, in this "real" world, it might be impractical? Dream ON! Dream a conscious dream! Help rebuild, resuscitate the planet, in a conscious way.

I didn’t really need the lighter…yet. The duo-pack are backup. I have a lighter in my bedroom and two lighters in the kitchen, and in truth with a bit of planning I could make do with one. I could, with some level of creativity, or safety pins, fix the broken zipper on my old lingeree bag, or have one of my clever friends rescue it from uselessness. But I like buying stuff! So it’s not an easy choice for, to buy less, to fix more, to walk up and down my stairs so I can use the same lighter, the one I left upstairs. It’s not an easy choice, but it’s a conscious one. And it may not infuse the economy with glee, but in the longer run, the stakes are getting high, for us, for the Earth. To buy or not to buy? that is the question.