I actually sold stuff...

I tried a different tack yesterday at the Grey Lynn Car Boot sale that actually ended up with sales. I took in old stuff, not made by me, which I have been keeping for projects but decided they won't ever be used but then used that need to cherish them still to set the prices fairly high. I always treat selling as more of a game now than any actual imperative to accumulate money and in this instance the choice of articles and demeanor in stating their value seemed to come together to end in the exchange of currencies.

It has always, in my life, been a source of intrigue and curiousity as to what others find valuable and worth buying. And not so much the thing itself as much as the reasoning and/or the emotion we might use to ascribe value to something.

And, of course, apart from the items or articles that allow us to be warm, fed and sheltered nothing else really has any use other than the defining gestures of personality. You are what you wear is actually you think you are what you wear because you are you no matter what you wear so it's the thinking that makes the difference.

This isn't new stuff and goes as far back as anything else does but can be locked down fairly easily to Buddha and his teachings as the source of all suffering. I'm sure others came across such insights in way, way distant past but I would suppose Buddha was one of the first to have enough critical acclaim to knot the rope of consequence around him as the first but who knows maybe the terrible trio of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates were also onto the same kind of thing.

But what it is safe to say is that for as long as human kind have had the gift of language to converse in we've had a few on the edges wondering why we do what we do and then comes the question of what is done with that speculative wondering.

In a sense that brings us back to the beginning of this narrative where I might be saying not that I make and collect things to sell but that I make and collect things so I can engage the mysteries of selling, the playground of wants, needs and desires.

To do so means one has to be in what might be called an enviable position or what is more often called lucky but though I'm a fan of being lucky it's so vague a position, a kind of unchallenged talent that arrives and leaves on the mists of chance that it doesn't really offer us much definable ability to ride with clarity and precision it's waves and eddies.

Because with all the people I see in enviable positions it's always the result of choices, even whilst many don't see their positions as enviable or can connect the dots that see the results of choices made.

But above and beyond choices it's always about money being far more important or far less important than is normally the case and interestingly enough the difference between realising ones enviable position seems always to be about the difference in importance of money. Therefore it's alike the clothes we wear and the thinking we ascribe to those clothes in setting our position in others eyes.

"Adversity is the state in which man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then."

John Wooden 

I heard this quote the other day in the movie Battleship and for that alone this Hollywood attempt at Blockbuster success was worth all the other heroic gestures so esteemed by the modern state of the middle American. Why? Because it's not anywhere as deep as it could be, doesn't tell us the whole story, but is a wonderful start to begin describing what adversity even is. Again the clothes we wear.

But I just remembered, I gotta do stuff, I gotta empty my brothers van of stuff and get it back to him so this thought just popped into my head.

Buddha might have said, I don't know, that's it's neither uphill or down hill, there is no hill... you are the hill.

That's a bit silly... but I get it,