Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Paying It Forward


We gave away our lawnmower today. It felt good to let it go without a second thought as to its value or any attachment to it. It ran well, but probably wasn't worth much anyway -- except to me when I was cutting the grass last season.

This season we have a couple local guys taking care of our lawn so it seemed like a good time to clear out some space in the shed and pat ourselves on the back for our charitable nature.

Yeah, right.... I belong to a Yahoo group called Freecycle. It's for people like me who don't want to wastefully discard useful items, but also don't want to go through the hassle of trying to sell them. I posted a description -- not like this machine was any kind of treasure -- and waited to see if I'd get a response.

Who knew that a free lawnmower would be so popular? I got two dozen responses. There is no set rule as to how to choose whom to give your treasures to. Subsequently, I had guilt because there were several almost impassioned pleas from people that needed it for one reason or another.

In the end, the lucky winners were a young couple that just moved into a home and hadn't any of the standard "home-owner" stuff to take care of their yard -- kind of like we were when we moved into the house after eight years of apartment living. We had lamented our lack of lawn care products upon buying our house and the seller offered us his lawn mower since he'd be buying a tractor to mow his new acre of land.

So it was good Karma and it had a certain symmetry that we pass on what we were given for free to those in the same situation. Now if there were only someone in need of a Karmic boost who needed to pass on a good used Harley....

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good one!! I think too many Harley riders think that getting the ride was a Karmic boost.
Oh, so you can't ride a freecycle? Wink.
Schotz