Reflection by Edgar Cahn
Timebanking rejects any assumption that work is limited to the exercise of marketable skills. It honors efforts that contribute to the reduction of social and ecological pathologies. Externalities generated by the market transactions can impair a life-sustaining ecosystem. What is the market value of reducing isolation, of creating a peer group that values one, of celebrating a trivial act of caring, or fidelity or empathy? Actions characterized as deviant can affirm what it means to be alive, to be conscious, to know that one has a mind with the awesome capacity to look at itself.
Minutiae become cosmic – because we are all at bottom, just a collection of molecules, brought together in ways we don’t comprehend, gifted with functional capacities to control matter, awaiting to interpret whatever feedback we get. Because that means that what one does matters, that we can make a difference in the life of someone else and by doing so, we spread radiating pools of meaning outward.
A story lives in the recounting, creating its own frame as a lens through which all of life’s moments can be viewed, magnified, interpreted and affirmed.
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