Tag: illusions

On Monday evening between work and an association meeting, I rushed to the grocery store to pick up the staples I’d run out of: juice, organic greens, carrots, milk and Ben & Jerry’s. I went to my usual grocery store, where I know exactly where everything is, so it should have taken me ten minutes. I roll my carts fast.

The first stop was the juice cooler at the end of the aisle next to the produce department. No Suja green juice for my breakfast smoothies. I turned the corner where they have a smaller juice cooler. Nope. I wheel down the aisle where I know there are other coolers and see different kinds of juice, but no Suja. I look up and down at every shelf. Fine. I put three bottles of other brands in my cart.

Back to the produce. Where the hell are the organic baby carrots? They are not where they usually are, they are not under the big banner that says “organic” and they are not by the six different kinds of non-organic carrots. After speed-wheeling around the entire produce section I get the regular carrots. They’re probably Monsanto, pesticide-laden, nutrient-deprived, flavorless sticks, but whatever. I was in a hurry.

At this point I notice the irritation I felt transform into rage. They have rearranged the store so that it looks almost the same as it used to, except they have moved or stopped carrying what I always buy.

There are so few things we can count on in life, and I was completely unprepared that knowing where things are in the grocery store was no longer one of them.

As I observed my inner rage, I limited my exterior reaction to a scowl on my face. I also acknowledged that since I was proud of myself for noticing my anger with detachment, I was both progressing in my spiritual enlightenment and still had enough work to do on my ego to continue hanging on Eckhart Tolle’s every word. Love him!

I continued scowling with detached rage towards the prewashed organic greens. I had to slow down to a normal grocery cart rolling pace so I could find the juicing greens that I wanted in an area that had tripled the number of lettuce containers. It took longer than usual to find what I wanted, but I did, and then was off to the dairy aisle. Along the way, I found a section of organic baby carrots, but said screw it, I was not going to backtrack all the way through the produce section to swap out one bag of carrots.

Thankfully, the milk and Ben & Jerry’s were where they should be. Although I was about to say something funny-sarcastic to a guy standing in front of the freezer, blocking my access. Then I recognized him as one of my neighbors and told him what I was about to say and we both laughed and chatted for a while.

At the checkout counter, the cashier asked if I found everything ok, and I said no, because a lot of stuff had moved and also there wasn’t any Suja juice in the now four separate juice locations. He called someone on one of those phones they have at their counters and then told me “Chris says we don’t stock that brand.” I told him I used to buy it RIGHT THERE, pointing at the juice cooler. He went on to tell me Chris has been at this store for twenty years, and if he says they didn’t stock it, he knows what he’s talking about.

I noticed with detachment that this isn’t very friendly customer service but I wasn’t even angry any more. I just wanted to pay so I could get home in time to unload the groceries and get to my meeting.

Then Chris appears with two small bottles of Suja juice and said they must be out of stock of the big bottles. My ego was so happy that the cashier was proven wrong that I lost several spiritual growth points.

Then the cashier handed me a card to take an online survey and said that if I rated them a 10 in customer service I would be entered to win a $100 gift card. That was so weird given the experience we had shared that for a moment I lost my ego completely. I was just pure consciousness, observing how strange humans are; how everything is an illusion.

And then I snapped out of it and ran my cart out to my car so I could get my ice cream home before it melted.