American Home has been my home-away-from-home this week. I’ve been checking out the queen sleeper sofas there. My curved, eleven-foot-long-twenty-year-old-custom-made sofa went to sofa heaven in Santa Barbara. It is not relocating to Albuquerque, New Mexico. My needs have changed. I need something smaller for my new, one-bedroom, old adobe home. I need a sleeper sofa for versatile living so friends, family and I can Motel 6 on it. I need a sofa firm enough and high enough my aging contemporaries (okay, and I) can easily get up from it. Fortunately, I am hooked up with metaphysical friends, a reference librarian and an interior designer, who can point the way. Like Lucy in Peanuts, the librarian is IN. The designer is IN.
On my last visit to Santa Barbara, I test slept a queen sleeper sofa with an air mattress in the designer’s stunning hacienda next to a fountain courtyard beneath wood-beam ceilings. Heaven. Those five days were closest to the experience of sleeping on my own beloved Tempurpedic. The designer agreed to look up product information for me. The reference librarian has a perfectionist friend with a black belt in shopping who purchased an award-winning sleeper sofa. She would call her. Pointed in the direction of Flexsteel products, I set forth.
January is the perfect month, the librarian informs me, to be shopping for furniture, appliances and white goods. Great. Because I need a washer/dryer too. Sales. Sales. Sales. But prices? I discovered entering a furniture store can be like shopping in an exotic souk or bazaar where everything is negotiable and there are no price tags. I found a sofa I really liked. How much was it? Well, that’s a question with an interesting answer. The sofa was at least four different prices (yes, the same sofa), depending on the day, time, source or person quoting it. It was 15%-20%-30%-40% off in person, online, or in the print ad I picked up in the store. The print ad featured an additional $100-off coupon according to the couple test-sitting sofas next to me. When I asked if the sofa I liked was available as a sleeper, the answer was, yes, for a $400-$700-$1,000 upgrade fee. Change of fabric was also available as an “upgrade.” I began to feel like I was playing the car-buying-shell-game where sale discounts could be clawed back through add-on fees.
American Home did not carry Flexsteel products, but Hilife Furniture a block away did. That was my next stop. There I met Thomas, and, after a remarkable encounter, learned about my “real” appointment for the day. Thomas did not have Flexsteel products on the floor, but he gave me great advice: “Don’t buy anything unless you can do the Goldilocks test on it.” He talked me into looking at another line of sofa beds he did have. He mentioned that his mother had aches and pains and needed a new bed but was too stubborn to consider one. Acknowledging he was Hispanic and a “macho male,” (I bonded with him right then and there!) he told me he’d been unable to convince her to consider a new bed. He even said she didn’t have to buy it from him. He was just concerned about her health. We sat down in a furniture grouping to talk. Knowing family values are really important to most Hispanics, I suggested he say to his mother something like, “It breaks my heart that you are suffering and in pain because you won’t open your mind to the possibility of getting a new bed. You don’t have to buy it from me. I am really just concerned about your physical wellbeing.” Thomas stood up, walked over to me, extended his hand, shook mine and said, “Thank you. I am going to create that conversation with her today.” I was stunned. I didn’t really absorb the impact of our interaction until later.
Contemplating our conversation, I was reminded of Ken Keyes Jr., Buckminster Fuller and Gandhi. In The Hundredth Monkey, Keyes describes monkeys in Japan, living on islands, subsisting on sweet potatoes. One monkey began washing her sweet potato to remove sand before eating it. Soon others were emulating her. Before long, all the monkeys on all the islands were doing the same. The “hundredth monkey” is the tipping point at which behavior changes in the whole. Buckminster Fuller called it “critical mass,” the point at which enough people practice something that everything shifts, the field of consciousness changes, and there is a new paradigm, or way, of doing things. Moment by moment, each day, in each interaction with another human being, I can choose to be the change I want to see in the world, contributing to the critical mass that shifts the consciousness of the planet. The peace doctor is IN. The love doctor is IN – we have the power within us to be our authentic selves with each person we meet. Our smallest daily actions contribute to the creation of critical mass. I don’t have to limit living from my higher self to the Hilife Furniture store. And I don’t have to charge 5 cents when the love doctor is IN.
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