Commision for Breathing

The most frequent question I get regarding couch surfing is whether I get paid or not. After all, I let a stranger crash on my couch for a few nights - I'm bound to be earning something, right?

The answer is yes and no.

I'd love to paint a shining picture of philanthropy where rainbow-colored puppies follow me and my surfer around DC, checking out national monuments and getting free ice cream. That's just a bit off. Of course I don't get any money for hosting, but I'd be lying if I said there were only intrinsic perks. From time to time, I'll have dinner paid for or something of that nature - my cover charge, a round of drinks. The key is that I don't walk into the situation expecting it, and I've learned something because of it.

You should keep your expectations low.

That may sound negative, but I think it's a wonderful thing. Life is uncontrollable, so having specific expectations about what someone will be like or what someone will do really hampers the actuality of a relationship. It places shackles on a person before you even meet. Once you spend a solid amount of time with them, it's easy to get impressions and create expectations then, but I find that I struggle with placing them on people ahead of time. It makes things a lot easier to deny how complex a person is.

I started thinking about the concept of being paid when it comes to other things in life. As a basic law of physics, there's a reaction to every action - and that's where payment comes from at its core. An action it taken, and it is given its due. Some people call this karma - watching it supposedly ebb and flow in the long term, but I prefer to think of it more simply than that. Or maybe more complex - I see bad deeds rewarded positively and negatively, and I see good deeds rewarded the same way. Karma dictates that the bad comes to the bad and the good comes to the good.

So if we get paid, I have to wonder how much say we have in our own life salary and what type of compensation we should be asking for. If you could be paid anything for living your life - monetary, realistic, animal, vegetable, mineral, abstract concept - what would it be? What should it be?