From what I’ve learned, the market today is quite different from its simple beginnings. There was a time where all merchants in a certain society would bring all their goods to market on a particular day every week – maybe a Saturday or so. There was a designated place and time where trade would take place on a large scale and everyone knew they could get what they needed if they brought whatever goods they could bring that were acceptable for trade. After all, all that is required for trade to take place is that a person possess more of some social good than what they themselves need to live and are willing to part with it for trade of something else that they need. This system has taken on a life of its own as all systems do. It has evolved, correcting its flaws and failures for the sake of its own self perpetuation. It’s developed into an all inclusive system of trade whereas everyone now has something that they can bring to market. Even at low levels of social wealth a person can now bring there own energies to market. This form of self trade has actually become the largest form of trade in today’s economy. It is the place where anyone can wake up every morning if he or she so chooses and bring their own energies to market for a wage.

Wages are another peculiar offspring of the market place. They bare in them all the influences of the market that determine the value of a person’s energies devoted to its society. This is not to be confused with the worth or value of the person, but only how great the social demand is for what this person offers by his or her devoted energies for the sake of society’s growth and perpetuation. After all, society is another living system that seeks to wax greater and greater, forever correcting its flaws and failures through goods and services offered to its people. This is illustrated in the fact that doctors clearly command a wage that outweighs many other laborers’ wages in our society. It is not that doctors are better people. I myself have known some doctors whom I would modestly say are  not our society’s best. This is debatable, but what is not so easily debatable is that most of us have an idea and even some historical account of what happens to a society where plagues and diseases are allowed to spread throughout. Such things have wiped out entire settlements in our own history. Maybe the fact that such plagues do not ravage our societies today allows us the privilege to take our doctors and nurses for granted, but even that is much to their credit. We are not though here to celebrate the medical profession. We are now discussing how wages are a measure of social value – not pure or simple value. Wages are of a social product born of society’s market place, which determines the value of goods based on the demand of the goods. Many different factors go into determining the wage of a particular service or good –  all of which I do not even intend to explore. I only wish to highlight human labor as one of the most (if not the most) common forms of goods and services offered in today’s every-day market place and that a wage is attached to each form of labor in a very certain way. I do however wish to break down the different ingredients that go into human labor and maybe even celebrate their importance.

For one, there is no good or service that exists in any society without human labor. Period!

All the material that is in the world is considered its natural resources and cannot be owned by one person or another. A person can purchase and own property rights and possess the sovereign right to the use of the trees on the property, but he must virtually alter its state in order to sell the trees as an item separate from is property and to do this he must labor to alter the state of the trees into some form of service or good. Whether it be chopping the tree down and then the tree itself to make wood, or using its leaves to make some ointment, the state of the tree will not become readily available for human use without its use being fashioned out of human thought and devotion of energy. So, when you purchase furniture for your house, it is not the tree you are paying for, because the value of the tree itself cannot be measured in society. Society can only measure the value of the human labor that went into its production. They do so simply be electing to purchase whatever you produce and demanding more of it. To further illustrate this, I will have us consider a person that chops the same tree and does not make it into furniture, but makes the wood into perhaps a bundle of fishing rods for a place where there is no bodies of water. Although his idea might be a good one, his skill might be superior, and his labors might be more extensive than that which is used to produce furniture, the society where he is working has no demand for his labor in fishing rods and as far as monetary purposes go, he labored in vain. Human labor in order to be valued, must take some natural resource and alter its state so that it can be used by its respective society. When you purchase a product in your neighborhood shopping center, whatever steps it took to get the material from its natural state to its current state is what you are paying for.

Now let us consider the altered state of any commodity and by what powers a person was able to create it. A laborer first needs an image or idea in the mind to work toward. Without that, we as humans have nothing to purpose us. We need an image planted in or conjured up by our minds. This is the simple trait that separates human labor from that of the animals. All animals that build caves, dens, dams, nests or any other structure do so simply because it is in their nature to do so. Their mothers and or fathers did it and so shall they naturally labor in this same way. Humans might build the same constructs as animals but do so with an image in mind or else they typically do not construct anything at all, with the exception of the arts.

How then, does a human get his idea of what his labor should translate into or to what finish it should alter our Earth’s natural resources? If he does not have an idea, he must get one. Whether it be through inspiration of the arts, study of the  particular sciences, or by the instructions of a higher positioned laborer (i.e. a boss or supervisor), he must have an idea. Then in order to transfer his idea onto the material, he must acquire some level of skilled labor. There is a level of experience that will affect the amount of natural resources needed to make a product, lessen the amount of mistakes that affect the cost, and serve to decrease the time spent per unit of production. There is then education that might lend to a producer the proper use of new machines and tools. Ultimately though, he must exercise concentration and focus that will concentrate all that he has acquired in skills and focus them to one task. I would like to add as a side-note that concentration and focus is such an integral part of our society’s value system that I feel it a real shame that so many children are being diagnosed with ADHD and whatever forms of scattered focus and concentration are out here today. I am even more disappointed that we treat this with mind altering drugs rather than with more natural mind settling practices. For if a person can’t focus and concentrate, nothing he imagines can stand in his mind – let alone be made by skill to be translated through his or her works into the world. To our salvation there are always employment at the factories where the products bear only the image of the machine that bore it, rather than the person that imagined and fashioned it.

This does though bring up the question this article is intended to present for consideration. Many of us use our labor – our focused energies as our product that we bring to market every day to earn our living and carve out some sort of life that we desire, this being the sovereign right of each member of our civilization. Biz at Hand in fact derives as a business model that focuses on the business at hand of each individual that would adopt it for his or herself. It suggests that we each deal with our own inner most needs, correcting our own flaws and failures. Once we find what serves us and profits us, then we can develop our methods further into ultimately a product or service that can help others with similar needs. It is the natural form of business that is inspired by the art of all living systems self correcting and self perpetuating. It is my belief that should we overlook these innermost demands of whatever system we wish to work and function in society, we will render it much less capable of doing any outbound task freely and thoroughly, because it still has inner-demands that command its focus and attention.  As a physical concern, this will of course diminish the level of focus a person can offer to any task. On a metaphysical level, this needy and frustrated state will transfer onto the product or it will inevitably show in the services rendered. This is the manner in which all products bear the resemblance of their maker, the best made products bearing no distinguishing mark at all, making them virtually flawless (again with the exception of the arts). As so, this article is about the task of perfecting our human energies making them suitable as an offer to our society.

As the creator of Biz at Hand, I have greatly reduced the amount of services I have offered to the public over the past year in an effort to be free to meet the major challenges and changes that have presented themselves in my life during this time. As a sole proprietor with no employees, the amount that I offer to society must equal the degree of which I can do so with goodness and faith – just the kind of energy I want to exist in the society I live in. Of course my consumer spending has also decreased as these two are directly tied. This introduces a certain distortion of how we often view wellness in society. Often we go through changes and transitions in society, but do not want our consumer spending to betray us, so we stress ourselves in order to maintain our same spending habits not to alert anyone that we are going through the same changes that everyone goes through. This to me is unhealthy and even though our economy as a whole benefits from a level of maintained spending, I believe society suffers from the pressure applied to our production, maybe by a rushed, frustrated, and thereby inferior product or service. Likewise, because my spending has decreased in society, one might be led to think that I myself am faring worse. My car certainly does not look as good. I am not able to frequent the same social scenes I was free to just a year or so ago. Nonetheless I feel that this is the true and the healthy balance that is required. My focus must be turned inward to the task of settling my own life into a new system of living by which I will produce. I must manage the simple aspects of my life to the degree that it produces at a level that is more than what I need, that I may have something good to offer to society. I never want to work to earn my living as if my living is a debt to society that I must pay back by working. I like to think that my life profits my society and I will work to further develop out my life’s ideas as I believe they are good for me and those around me.

So, I find myself working with what I call the pure energy of business. I will take in the arts for inspiration, study the sciences for understanding, exercise and eat right to gain command of my energies, work in society to stay connected, and enjoy whatever else I find that I would like to possess and interpret through some form of service.

On Sept 11, 2011 this is the business at hand – the business of life.