Shopping

It’s a strange perception of the modern mind that everything can be bought and costs don’t give rise to second thoughts. I have witnessed buying sprees, I have seen men and women carrying the burdens of their desire for having what they can buy. I have seen the fruits of labour being wickedly over-rated, but still able to hook the inevitable buyer whose pocket bulges not out of the paper money but out of the accumulation of list and lists of things to be bought.

I have had this fear that I was dramatizing the simple act of bartering that our race has known, since we knew the exact cost of our labour and the other knew of his. I also struggled to find hundred rational reasons, which compel us to need things that we buy or buy things that we think we need. I am still struggling to close that vital zillion-fraction inch gap between thinking that I know and knowing that I know. What binds us more to things than it binds us to us? What are those rhythms of things to which we tune our movements? Will I ever know what I need? Will I ever buy things because they have to be bought and not because they can be bought? Can I ever give up my baggage for a lighter existence, an existence that is unhindered by various shops that hide the green forests, by people selling what they have and not what I need?

I guess I know what I have to do. I have to buy a new pair of glasses and see the bazaar through fresh eyes. I seem to have missed a point or two…