Look closely at the first photograph.
The Buddha rests his head on one hand—the same pose you strike at two in the afternoon when coffee is no longer enough and the day has already dragged itself across you without permission. Eyes closed. Peace printed on his face by a few thousand years of iconography.
And from his neck, beside the orange wooden prayer beads wrapped around his wrist and trailing to his golden foot, hangs a white tag.
The price of enlightenment, ladies and gentlemen.
Written by hand, tied with string, like everything else in that shop crammed with miniature gods, red curtains, and fake-gold frames gleaming brighter than the faith of anyone who ever truly believed.
The funny thing is that it did not scandalize me for even a second.
I laughed.
Not at the Buddha.
At us.
Because we keep buying things in the belief that they can fill spaces that have nothing to do with objects.
We buy books hoping to become more intelligent.
Clothes hoping to become more desirable.
Watches as though wearing time were enough to teach us how to use it.
And then we buy spirituality.
Do not misunderstand me. I am not here to moralize about spirituality for sale—that would be hypocritical even by my standards, and my standards are already fairly low. I am only saying there is something strangely honest about an enlightened Buddha with a price tag hanging from his meditating hand. At least there the transaction is declared. At least no one pretends peace is free.
Crystals.
Incense.
Small statues.
Pendants.
Promises.
Anything with the reassuring scent of an answer.
Deep down, we remain consumers even while trying to stop being consumers.
The funny part is that I do not even believe it is a scam.
I simply think everyone is looking for exactly the same thing.
A reason to breathe a little easier.
A reason to be less frightening to themselves.
A little farther on, a woman was looking at a colored lamp.
She looked at it the way children look at fireworks.
The way people in love look before they know everything will go to shit.
It was a beautiful look.
Clean.
Sincere.
There was nothing magical about that lamp. Mass-produced, probably in a factory two hours from where I photographed it, sold at an inflated price to people wanting to carry home a piece of the East along with the guilt of the flight that brought them there.
But the woman’s expression—that was real. No factory can mass-produce it.
It is the look all of us wear, sooner or later, before something that makes us forget for one second how skilled we have become at no longer being amazed by anything.
And that was when I understood something.
The lamp was not special.
She was.
Because wonder never lives inside objects.
It lives in the eyes of those still willing to be surprised.
And it is a quality we lose quickly.
We grow up.
Then we become cynical.
Then we call it “maturity” when nothing moves us anymore.
It is a con.
One sold so well that it even seems normal.
I continue to believe the world still belongs to anyone who stops before a light, a face, a sunset, or an old Buddha wearing a price tag.
Not because I truly believe a statue can illuminate a life.
But because I believe the way we look at things says far more than what those things actually are.
I left the shop without buying anything.
Or at least that is what I told myself.
Because in truth, I carried something away.
The tiny, slightly ridiculous hope that somewhere inside us there is still a part capable of wonder.
And perhaps that is the one thing no one will ever manage to put on sale.
At least I hope so.
Because if I ever find that wearing a price tag too…
I will probably buy it.
We stopped believing quickly enough to become cynical, but never seriously enough to stop buying small pieces of magic to carry home. We stand in the middle, between the Buddha with the price tag and the woman looking at the lamp as though it were the first beautiful thing she had seen in months.
And perhaps that no-man’s-land between cynicism and the desperate desire to believe in something is where we spend most of our lives.
I am usually standing in the doorway. Smoking a cigarette, watching everyone go inside to buy a little packaged peace, wearing the expression of someone who knows better.
Then, when no one is looking, I go in too.