Fair Trade

Everyday we trade things. I began trading stickers in primary school. Two scratch and sniff stickers were fairly negotiated for a puffy Scooby Doo. I was an avid reader as a girl. Library books were traded and consumed over and over again. Global economies are upheld by a trading system of commodities and stocks, and our financial stability is waged on the culmination of good and bad, long term and short term decisions.

I traded 2 days of travel for an adventure between the Sea and Sky. I spent many hours in airports and airplanes, so to visit my incredible friends on the west coast, and one hell of an amazing city. As I flew across the country last week...over mountains and prairies, through cumulus clouds and time zones...I thought about the trade off.

If we place the highest worth on those things that are most precious and impossible to duplicate, then the expense of our time should have the highest trading value in our lives.

Sometimes we realise after a transaction, whether it was financial, emotional, spiritual or an increment of time, that perhaps, we made an unwise decision with our investment. As it may be, the pay off wasn't equal to the contribution. Or we realise what exists, was bound to change and develop...and the initial investment grows into a very valuable and strangely prismatic personal masterpiece.

We don't get our time back. Hopefully, we mindfully trade into those things and people that are going to provide a continual and flourishing return. A fear faced and conquered provides the most gratifying return on your trade. A fear faced and failed at, still provides valuable lessons and tools for the future. When we know better...we do better.

So think about what you're trading...your time..your heart..your money..your peace. Choose honesty. Work to follow your heart in your trades. Be fearless. Even if the only outcome you land with after the leap is clarity...I venture to declare, it was worth it.

“You have to let go of who you were to become who you will be.” ― Candace Bushnell

Keys

I am somewhere else. I am sitting in the apartment of someone I know, in a city on the other side of the country...and I feel somehow like a newer, more attuned me.

I found a key on the sidewalk yesterday... in this city that I don't live in...in a place I haven't been before. It's unusual, and like no other key I have seen before. It is slightly tarnished, and a shape that I am not familiar with. It's now on the inside of my red purse, and I will string it around my neck when I get home as a reminder of my vacation.

It somehow serves too, as an even bigger reminder that keys are falling in front of me all the time. That new things are being opened up to me as I step into life with just a whisper of faith sometimes...believing that those magic, crazy kismet moments I hear about...those moments that seem to happen to everyone else...well, they may just be springing up as my toes hit the pavement.

No one needed to tell me that there is a certain amount of clarity and calm exhale that comes from taking a break. I remember a break I took last year after the worst loss of my life...and truthfully, and with 100% honesty, that escape to another country and into the arms and company of my deeply kindred and most beloved best friend saved me. Being away and being home with her all at once, was more soothing and cleansing than any church I could enter. I found peace...protection, love and understanding in that hiatus from my chaotic life.

And now, in this moment, I am in a city that boasts sea and mountains, and houses some amazing people I am lucky to call friends. I am renewed again. I will head home in a few days, and somehow feel rejuvenated and wildly excited about the next chapters of my life...new beginnings as I step off an airplane headed East, and home...

and a key to remind me to always chase new beginnings to open up my own happiness.