Today’s shopping lesson starts with a zen-tastic mantra, courtesy of the gurus at Om Yoga Center. What the eff do sun salutations have to do with thrift? So glad you asked.
Yoga increases one’s capacity for patience. Patience tips the secondhand shopping scales in or out of your favor. Yoga is, heretofore, an excellent tool for developing your secondhand shopping prowess.
Onto the mantra:
If it’s comfortable, you’re probably not doing it right.
If you’re ego-centric and stubborn a la moi, instructional nuggets of this ilk tend not to prompt any revelations upon first hearing: I was in triangle pose, and I still managed to roll my eyes. It was only when the instructor glided over and re-tweaked my body into the proper position that I realized I’d been doing it wrong all along. I’d been too consumed by how it looked to make it work.
Triangle is a deceptively simple posture, as it turns out – the side-bending, twisting and stretching involved don’t amount to a pleasant experience. It’s not physically painful, but it’s uncomfortable and unsettling, particularly when you don’t have the flexibility to mimic the statuesque curve of more devoted yogis.
Then you move out of the pose, feel the rewarding rush prompted by your efforts – by your ability to embrace what it is in lieu of what it’s supposed to be – and you stop rolling your eyes at the mantra.
Comfortable doesn’t prompt growth or achievement. Uncomfortable does.
On that note, let’s talk about the uncomfortable experience of thrifting the Hell’s Kitchen Salvation Army.
My last visit to this particular SA location was four months ago, i.e. enough time for me to forget how disgusting it is. Time and time again, I block out the grime on the floor, the stains on the clothes, the screaming babies accompanying the shoppers, the musty, mothball-esque odor of the place. It’s an unconscious survival tactic – insurance against my being too icked out to shop.
It takes about fifteen minutes to re-acquaint myself with my surroundings. I calm myself with the knowledge that I’ve come prepared (plastic bag, Purell, hands-free bag), and meditate on scores of the past bestowed on me by the HK SA (Rich and Skinny jeans, $7.99). I embrace the ick. I summon the patience. I do an internal spin, Tazmanian Devil style. Then I tear through the place like a possessed flying rodent, brand-focused radar leading the way.
Velvet tops, as we know, retail for around $80 – $100 a pop. I found this versatile tunic approximately eighteen minutes into my browse. And it’s striped! I effing love stripes.
The stellar taupe tone of these puppies is tres Fall appropriate. 
I don’t usually buy pants months in advance of when I can wear them: Rock & Republic jeans priced at $4.99 are obvs grounds for an exception.
I didn’t leave the Hell’s Kitchen Salvation Army scarred by fugly wares and subpar sanitation standards. I left buoyed by a mantra as true of thrift as it is of yoga.
Sifting through the donated muck isn’t comfortable.
It’s the uncomfortable that makes the price of whatever you find so effing right.
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