There are things that are bought and sold that can never be owned. Things taken that cannot be kept. Things possessed that one can never truly hold. "Our ideas about property and theft depend on a set of assumptions about how the world is divided up”, Lewis Hyde says. The way it is hoisted, hung, halved, and drained. Every vital thing removed. The way it is sectioned off and carved apart. Packaged in plastic. Tagged with parallel lines. Machine readable data. A representation of a life put out for sale.
We buy time. We pay attention. Concerns we either can or can't afford. We wonder about our worth. Try to steal a moment. Production, consumption, and trade. Gifts turned into commodities. Dividends distributed, but not always to the highest bidder. Sometimes simply the most convenient. The one with the shiniest screen. The supply of yearning with the loudest demands. The hollowest shell. The emptiest well. Scarcity, craving, deprivation, and fear.
"We arrive in this world with birthright gifts," Parker Palmer says, and "then we spend the first half of our lives abandoning them or letting others disabuse us of them." Sometimes the second half isn’t much better. We’re told we’re not enough and we start to believe it. Parts of ourselves put up for auction. Pennies per the pound. Sweat equity bottled like snake oil and sold by the ounce. We take what we can get and we hoard it. Without ever asking if we ever really wanted it at all. A beast of burden laden with what the world calls wealth, buckling at the knees. We almost never stop to wonder if this is all there is.
What would it be like to be un-yoked, untethered, unbound? What would it mean to be in control? Maybe change isn’t an acquisition, but a matter of letting go. Not something gathered, garnered, or gained, but something that breaks the economy of exchange.
Potential through negation. The prospect of negative space. Control that arrives through relinquishing. Not a question of what you can have, what you can get, or what you can take, but what you can take away. The medium of possibility through all you can do without. A potency in powerlessness. More derived through less.
"Half of your mastery“, Robert Greene says, “comes from what you do not do.” It begins with a razor’s focus. With elimination. With amputation. A calm and steady hand. Corrosive resistant steel. Ruthlessness and resolve. It's what you refuse to be a part of, to participate in, to go along with. “What you do not allow yourself to get dragged into.” A rejection of complicity. It is a pitiless chiseling. A radical dwindling. It is surgery and butchery. Until there is but a single guiding principle. One true, essential thing. A pearl of great price, for which you’d give up everything.