The first free will offering of 2014

Last week I was leaving the market walking south on first avenue. I passed someone in a wheelchair and a couple steps later heard a faint, "Excuse me".  I slowed down to make sure the request was directed at me. "Excuse me", he said again with no greater insistence, just very calmly.

Often I don't stop, but this time my social filters told me--it's OK there is nothing to be lost here. I walked up beside the young man. I thought he was maybe in his early twenties. He immediately thanked me for not ignoring him like everyone else. He quickly told me his story. Diabetic, wound on his leg, no health insurance, etc. He showed me his wound. His right ankle was red and swollen with large scabs; I could barely look at it and told him so. I immediately apologized. What had gotten into me?

These chance encounters are so full of clues and I felt I was only playing a part in some little drama. When reality is too much I'm just in someone else's movie. It takes the pressure off.

He had a short stack of papers clipped together and a cell phone on his lap. He showed me the name of the drug he was taking. I recognized it as a powerful antibiotic. Underneath that sheet was a bus schedule with a list of figures written in black Sharpie. They were unidentified costs large and small and obviously adding up quickly. Every word from him was matter-of-fact with no hint that any of it was less than true. "I need ten bucks to get out of the hole", he said.

I reached into my bag and pulled out a couple fives. I said something that quashed the gods of self-consciousness, and so was more for me than him. "Some people would say don't trust him, but I don't give a fuck."

He looked up at me with a stare that said, I can't believe you just did that. And then he said something I knew was not necessarily part of the typical beggar's vernacular. "I'll pay it forward. I always do." Instantly he became a new person, more complete in my mind's eye even as I knew nothing else about him. I patted him on the shoulder probably more forcefully than I needed to and quickly continued on my way lest I became emotional and embarrassed.

My hyper imagination allows random feelings to live too close to the surface. It confuses me. I constantly need to check in with other sources to understand what the hell is going on. One of those sources is Charles Eisenstein.

I recently finished his book The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible. It is a series of essays like no other I've ever read. Eisenstein is known for dissecting the underlying currents, or lack thereof, behind currency transactions. The connection I made with this person was so vague and tangential, but it wouldn't have existed at all had I not engaged in some kind of conversation. Of course, I could have taken out a couple bills and stuffed them in his hand and walked away without a word. Then what?

He would have gotten his money just the same, but he would not have had the opportunity to justify the validity of his need and thus to explain the context of his life. By refusing to comprehend my own involvement in a life as fragile as his own I am living a lie that is encouraged by a  silent currency transaction. And so, if one fails to connect the power of money with the power of human connection that power is hideously misused. It is a power that acknowledges only the necessity of the transaction and denigrates the value of the players as if they are only conduits, like having electricity without wires, it is just static that fills the air waiting to find a place to spark. Perhaps that is why it is popular to say that money is energy. This only points out how easily symbols are confused with the real thing. Money doesn't have energy, people do. (Sound familiar?) Redistribution of money sounds like a very unpopular political initiative, but if the comparison to energy is valid why not frame it as realigning chi? Get the flow going. Prevent stagnation for better health. Here the comparison works. Scarcity quickly becomes the lie it is.

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If the value of money could somehow be conjoined with the idea of caring and sustaining the continuation of life, and simultaneously be dismantled from the idea that over accumulation is the requirement for well-being, then those with way too much of it might want to dispense with their excesses in order to regain some shares of love. What a concept! Obviously, I'm not afraid of sounding a little silly in order to make a point. Conjecture often gets to a version of the truth that works if only in writing. I'd like to think it is self-evident that money without relationship is a cold, dead _______________. Fill in the blank. You'll never get any love from it. This is obvious, but where is the movement?