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Today's
quotation:
My wish simply is
to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and
our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means
that we must save ourselves from the products that we are
asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.
Wendell Berry
The Art of the Commonplace
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Today's
Meditation:
What
truly defines me? Is it my relationships with my
family and friends, or my car? Is it the ways that I
treat other human beings, or the house that I
"own"? When people see me, are they more
interested in the look in my eyes and the kindness I show,
or the clothes that I wear? Advertisers tell me that
I'll be more popular, more acceptable, even happier if I
buy their products, because I'll impress other people with
them. But if I follow this road, I'm setting myself
up for disappointment because the impression these things
make is fleeting, and because styles change constantly--
mostly in order to keep us buying more.
I've
known people who have spent more time working on and being
in their cars than they have with their families.
These people have seemed more like car owners to me than
mothers or fathers, wives or husbands, daughters or
sons. When we spend our time on our possessions, we
become slaves to them and we tend to make decisions in
life based on our relationships with the possessions
rather than based on the relationships we have with the
other people in our lives. We become a person who is
more interested in getting and maintaining possessions
than we are in helping others and being a positive force
in other people's lives.
This
doesn't need to be so, though. It happens mostly
because of the allure of owning something that will
impress other people, a path that we accept because we
feel that we can't be someone that other people want to be
with unless we have something cool or beautiful or
expensive. But you'll find that more people want to
be with you when you're kind and generous and
compassionate, because they know that you'll treat them
well. Many of us learned when we were kids that
other kids mock the kind kids, so we turned to other ways
to impress people-- the short-term ways that give us
momentary satisfaction, but nothing long-lasting.
It
really is time for us to move away from possessions and
move towards developing who we are as people. It's
time that we associate with people who love us as we are,
not for what we have. It's time that we allow
ourselves to be ourselves without trying to supplement
that self with possessions that we believe will cause
others to be interested in us. That may work for a
few minutes or a few days, but life is a bit longer than
that.
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