We spend years struggling to find the answers to questions about our lives. Who are we? Why are we here? and What's our purpose? These can be addressed in this week's piece: From Confusion To Clarity: How You Can Transform Your Life
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Last week, many nations indulged in the annual festival of buyer’s remorse: Black Friday, promptly followed by Cyber Monday, the digital hangover.
Your inbox, I imagine, was heaving with “unmissable” offers, some genuine, others from brands that either ignore you most of the year, or have never spoken to you at all. And suddenly… this week, they care.
How touching. How faux.
Personally, these missives serve only as a reminder to scroll to the bottom and press the most honest button in all of commerce: 'unsubscribe'.
We don’t join the stampede. Never have. We’ve even sidestepped partnership deals because the products themselves didn’t sit right.
Ethics and reputation come first. Always.
Take last week’s Little Jar of Joy. Not exactly a thunderclap sale. I did the arithmetic: the sea salt, the Kilner jar, the labels, the postage, the packaging - by the time the dust settled, our princely profit was a fraction over £1.
And that tiny profit? Off it goes to someone who needs it rather more than we do, via KIVA: small entrepreneurs in places where banks the lend money exist mostly as rumours.
Taxi drivers in El Salvador coaxing life from engines held together with hope and string. Shopkeepers in Burkina Faso running their ledgers on instinct rather than accounting software, herb distillers in Lebanon whose hands carry the day’s perfume. Cow and sheep herders in Azerbaijan listening for the soft-footed approach of predators.
Some of our contributions end with a sigh, a default, a shutter pulled down for the last time. And yes, it stings. Not the loss of the money, but the sense that you were a small wind in their sail, and still, they couldn’t make the shore. But more often, something lifts.
A taxi is repaired. A shop expands. Children sit in classrooms instead of doorways. And our contribution becomes the invisible hand steadying someone else’s ladder.
We wouldn’t care to be in their shoes, so we offer what help we can from ours.
For us, real impact will always outruns manufactured urgency. Every time.
Your support is always appreciated.
Graeme & Phylipa Dinnen
ResourcesForLife.net
