It's Sunday, a "day off" for me, since I usually don't schedule work or even social activities on Sundays. I think even us retired folks can benefit from having one day a week with no responsibilities. Observing the Sabbath has traditionally been seen as a strict rule for behavior, but actually I think it was intended as a gift to hard-working humans. Life offers lots of gifts, but we don't always take advantage of them. Along this line, I was thinking recently about an incident that happened with one of my ESL students a while back.
I was on a break from my teaching job, and as I walked through a big parking lot to a nearby K-Mart, I noticed one of my students walking ahead of me, going in the same direction. I watched as she stopped, bent down, picked something up, examined it closely, and then tucked it into her pocket.
I walked a little faster, and when I caught up with her I asked her what she had found. She showed me - it was an almost-new yellow pencil. That student, Helen, was one of my favorites. She was from Taiwan, in her late 50’s, and didn't speak a lot of English even after having been in classes for a year. She did not work and lived with her grown son, who was a manager at an Amazon warehouse. One thing I learned about Helen was that she was very thrifty and an expert at finding bargains. She would occasionally gift me with things she'd found on sale and thought I might be able to use: a family pack of frozen, breaded chicken patties; a reusable shopping bag; two pairs of cotton trousers.
At the time, I was a little surprised and then amused at Helen's picking up the discarded pencil. How many of us would have done that? But later I thought about it... why not? It was a perfectly usable pencil, almost new, and would just have been ruined or swept up and thrown away if someone hadn't rescued it. In a way, it was a gift, and clearly Helen saw it as such. After all, most of us find ourselves having to spend our money to buy pens or pencils from time to time. Granted, pencils are cheap, about 20 cents apiece. But to Helen, 20 cents was 20 cents. If you saved 20 cents every day for a year, that would be $73! What could you do with an extra $73?
So why don't we all do this? Why don't we take advantage of the tiny gifts life constantly offers up to us... the pencils we see lying on the street, the small savings we notice but then pass up, the offers we just don't get around to taking up?
There are a lot of factors that probably go into play here: pride, habit, laziness, a false sense of privilege, an I’ll-do-it-myself mindset. I know I've had a tendency to think I'm "too good" somehow to pick up a usable item off the street. I feel more comfortable buying it. Or it may be soiled or tarnished, and I'm just too lazy to want to clean it up. I know a lot of people feel like used goods are somehow "contaminated," and they are not OK with shopping at yard sales, for example. Now, I don't think I'd buy used socks or underwear, but little by little I've gotten comfortable with most other kinds of used (or found) items. I can't even fathom it, but I know that there are people out there who don't even like to buy things on sale! As if a sale price somehow devalues the item or themselves. I guess those attitudes are fine if you are rolling in money, but when you are financially limited, it sure pays to learn to divest yourself of attitudes that prevent you from taking advantage of "gifts" that come your way.
Starting a couple weeks ago, an ad started popping up on my Kindle tablet. It informed me that if I changed my one-click buying option to a Citibank credit card, I would get a $10 Amazon.com credit. Now, a Citicard is one of my three credit cards (I refuse to have more), so why did it take me until today to take a couple of minutes to make that change and get a free $10 gift? There is nothing at all wrong with the card or its terms, especially since I pay off all charges on my cards every month. So why not? Laziness, I guess. So anyway, now I've done it and I have $10 to apply to a purchase on Amazon.
As I was at my desk, I also took a minute to do the on-line validation of a replacement credit card I just got in the mail from another bank. As I cut up the old, outdated card, I realized the scissors I used were sturdier than the ones I used to use, and that this was the pair of scissors I found lying at the curb in the snow last month. They had been a little rusty, but I took them inside, washed them, took a second to scour the bits of rust off the blades, and noticed they were a good brand and nice and sharp. I'd been thinking of buying a new pair of scissors - these were better than what I'd probably have purchased.
Why was the pencil lying in the parking lot, or the scissors at my curb? Who knows. Things fall out of bags, kids throw away all kinds of perfectly good stuff. I live on a moderately busy corner, and every so often I find boxes or bags of things lying in the street. Do they fall out of overloaded trucks? I don't know, but in the last year I've salvaged a couple of plastic storage crates, a few earthenware saucers perfect for under my plant pots, those scissors, and a reusable shopping bag containing a new YMCA t-shirt and a new pair of Nike tennis shoes, both in my size. I just washed everything thoroughly and put it to use. These were all things I needed and would probably have ended up buying at some point. I'd estimate that I probably saved $50 at minimum, even if I'd gotten lesser quality items on sale.
Life really does seem to offer up gifts big and small. But it's up to us to notice them and then be able to take advantage of them. I've had to make the effort to consciously adjust my attitudes in order to be able to do this, I'll admit. But when you're on a limited budget, that effort is well worth it.
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