Day 99 ❦ Give free of judgment, gratefully, and willingly

Day 99  ❦ Give free of judgment, gratefully, and willingly

The Gift: A massive yard sale

It is fitting that the second to last day of this journey, subtitled, an exercise in hope, incorporates one of my “go-to” strategies when I am stressed about money…a yard sale! Or for those of us who grew up on the East Coast…a tag sale! A yard sale helps me to focus my energy on getting rid of clutter freeing myself up from the attachments made with material objects and puts a little cash in my pocket. I like pricing everything to sell and especially enjoy watching as people interact with my goodies and make decisions to bring something home with them, or better yet, if they think of someone they can give one of my things to as a gift. It is just a great time of energy exchange.

A yard sale is made even better if it is a multi-family sale which this one today is, then we can share duties, drink tons of coffee while we interact with literally hundreds of people and of course, we have more items to trade amongst ourselves…but today since my goal is to get lighter – I am not trading, at least to bring anything more into my home. I need to jettison stuff out of here.

This yard sale is bittersweet on so many levels, one of my friends whose stuff now adorns my yard is moving and I will miss her dearly, and then there is all of the stuff I bought with great hope, hope in what the item would do for me or the person I bought it for, hope about the money that I would make to pay for the item and hope that at some point, there things would change us/me in some manner. In many ways, this is a time of lost hopes and dreams, and those items are priced even better than most – time to get rid of the attachments. And, there is some anxiety that creeps in as people look at my stuff and make value judgements about the items they are looking at, “how tacky”, “who would pay money for that?”, “what the heck is this?” all ploys to establish a foundation for negotiating.

Now I have gotten a lot better about both negotiating and not caring what someone is saying about my stuff, in fact, I have a crazy ritual that includes me hand marking every item so that I can have a final moment with the thing I am selling. Kind of like sending off my bill payments with a prayer of gratitude to the Universe. In many ways I am reliving the moment I acquired the object, what the intent was, the hope attached and the outcome of the gift, and then I am saying goodbye to it and making my own value judgment as it leaves my hand marked into a box ready for display. By the time I put the items on a table in the sale, I have no connection with them. Negotiating is a different story.

I have negotiated with the best all over the world and I am pretty good at it, although my oldest daughter is better, but when it comes to my stuff I am a push-over although you couldn’t tell by the way I can walk away from someone who is trying to get into a good negotiating position. In fact, if someone comes up to me with one of my items on the sale and asks if I will take a lesser price, I always say yes. Now that I have published this I will need to change my strategy, but I will have to re-evaluate that concept when I get there.

So we’ve got all of this great stuff, all priced to sell, lots of workers and lots of buyers – it is a great day filled with a lot of great interactions. Gifts were given all over, almost everyone left with something and all left smiling. What a great day – Day 99 is complete…I am exhausted, happy and sad all at the same time.

❦ Give free of judgment, gratefully, and willingly and the Universe will return the favor.