the w0nd3r: #26 - Skills Exchange

Greetings Beautiful People

Link to original image at dreamstime.com

1) Quote

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
George Bernard Shaw

2) Abundant Exchange

I’m lying face-up on a massage table. Saul inserts a fine needle into my right thigh higher than the first and twists it. It’s almost like he’s tuning in a radio, I feel a surge of electricity shoot down an invisible power line between the two points. It’s like my body has a circuit board within it and a section of it has just lit up.

It’s my first therapy exchange, Reiki for Acupuncture, but definitely not my last. I now have regular exchanges giving hypnotherapy in return for massage, recently I worked with another hypnotherapist so that we could both experience past-life regression and I have just agreed to teach someone boxing coaching in return for swing dancing. That should be interesting...

Skills exchanges are amazing. You get to learn and experience new things and develop your own skills at the same time. Exchanging things you like doing is a lot more fulfilling than paying for them.

The only reason I started doing this is because a therapist friend suggested the idea to me years ago but I now I'm thinking why stop there?

I think one of the problems in the world today is that lots of us are doing things we don’t want to do and aren’t supposed to be doing. There are actors pretending to be administrators, artists pretending to be lawyers and teachers pretending to be businessmen (that was just based on a few people I’ve met). I firmly believe if we were all doing what we are supposed to be doing we’d be a lot happier and the world would be a better place for it.

So maybe you hate doing your accounts but there is someone out there who’d love to balance your books and could do it very well. And maybe he needs someone to help him with web design or babysitting or something.

Around the world more and more skills exchanges and time banks are being set up and I think we’re moving into a time where the focus will be more on co-operation and collaboration than competition. I know, I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

I'm sure that a long time ago before money existed a lot more exchange of goods and services was taking place. I’ve got some chickens, you’ve got some milk - let’s do this!

That reminds me, I told a friend I’d keep my eyes open for someone that could balance her books in return for massage, and someone has just popped into my mind...

What skills could you offer?

"Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger.

And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.
"Khalil Gibran - The Prophet

3) Song: Skillz by Gangstarr