Why You Ought To Pay

My meditation instructor Limor Babai of Double Bay Meditation Centre once told me that I was not allowed to build a blog for her without being paid. Somewhere in her Vedic world view they had come up with the notion that you shouldn't have peace love and mungbeans and giving yourself away for free all the time. When I asked her why, she explained that it had something to do with respect and energy. Because my brain is deteriorating with age, I promptly forgot the wisdom she imparted but I shall do my best to recall how she came to this conclusion.

Working for someone, making something or doing something is an act of physical or mental exertion. Either you used your mind's energy to solve a problem or else you used both your physical and mental energy to solve a problem for another human being. This energy is a transfer from one area to another. On that basis, there must be a transfer back from the recipient to the donor otherwise you create an imbalance. Negotiating how much energy equals how much energy is then the nature of business but the onus is on the person who receives the energy to make the adequate transferral back to the source from where it came. Based on this notion, you can see why revolutions in previous generations occurred; a small group of people take too much energy from another set of people until the energy must eventually be taken back from the former to the latter. The respect for this relationship of energy transferral is what makes up the Tai Chi 'Ying Yang', or so I am lead to believe.

The reason I offer this up at this time is that the number of enquiries from small boutiques, new online stores and pop-up spaces for consignment stock is starting to gall me. The notion that I should spend an enormous amount of energy to create beautiful silks bows is akin to creating a lovely ripe fruit. When I put this ripe fruit in your store or on your website, it is akin to putting it front position on the fruit market shelf where everybody will turn it over, touch it, squeeze it, stroke it, and then put it back. Rapidly the fruit goes from being ripe to being rotten. If you didn't pay for the fruit before you sold it, you are unlikely to look after the fruit in the same way as if you had paid for it. This comes back to the respect for energy in the form of money being transferred. For this reason, I beg of you, do not ask for consignment stock. You must respect what we do, and in doing so, you must pay for the stock.