Money, honestly

I started looking and thinking about money today. How much I might need, where to get it, who to get it from. Then I started to feel quite ill.

I don’t think I’ve ever really got money. As in understood it or valued it. And I certainly didn’t get the pursuit of it. One of my favourite quotes from one of my favourite authors, Douglas Adams sums it up:

“This planet has-or rather had-a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy”

Small green pieces of paper or rather numbers on screen now. It all seems very odd to me, and obviously Douglas, that they such a hold over a lot of us.

And now I want to start a shop. And a shop is pretty much known for being a place where these pieces of paper are exchanged for what is on sale. Can someone this non-plussed about money actually run a thriving shop? I am sure certain people in my life are worried about this. They see me as too flakey or not “commercial” enough. I worry about money dictating my pace, becoming under its control and resenting that. This, as well as balance, is going to be one biggest challenges I am going to face in making dream a reality.

So lets start by again remembering to breathe and not allow fear to carry me away…

A very wise friend of mine would say to me to think of money as energy. I can get that. So I can see a transaction as an exchange of energy.
Another wise friend would remind me that when you offer something for free this can be mean in is not valued. And actually when you offer something someone values the receiver often wants to offer something in return. So money when reinterpreted as energy is a symbol of value.

But what I see important or rather essential is that this process involves trust between the two parties. It could be easy for each party to exploit the other without trust.

One particular method of exchange which excites me is the Honesty method and I’d really like to incorporate this in my shop. The Honesty method or Pay-What-You-Want/Feel is when you offer goods or services for whatever the person buying them thinks they are worth. I love this because it involves complete trust on both parts and embraces how subjective value really is. It doesn’t scare me either because I believe that most people would want to pay what they think something is worth and understand the role they play.

And may it also represents an equal exchange of energy.

So reading back I see this is my message today. Trust. Don’t focus on the negatives of money, focus of the positives of people.

Phew. Feeling better now.