Winter Settling Moon
Opened the last kitchen box this morning. Kate’s busily creating spaces to put the treasures I dig out. At one point this morning she said, “We’ve got so much stuff!” with an exasperated sigh. She’s right, I suppose, though we’ve gathered this stuff over 25 years together. A third purge, which Sarah Strickland predicted, will occur. Goodwill Denver, here we come.
The Stoics want us to be free from emotional entanglement. The Buddhists want us to be free from desire. Western spiritual thought wants us to be free from things. Think George Carlin’s famous rant about stuff. None of these blanket proscriptions satisfy me. In fact, they seem to pointedly ignore the human condition.
Our emotions guide us, warn us, help us make decisions. Desire defines our pursuits through this life. Following our bliss, finding our passion mark desire as an important element in living a full and authentic life. And then there’s our stuff.
Like emotion and desire, stuff can overwhelm us, cripple us, even, in some cases, defeat us. But, like emotion and desire, the physical things with which we surround ourselves support us and give us the tools we need to live our lives. Raising our emotional life to consciousness, raising our desires to consciousness and raising our stuff to consciousness so we can make choices about them seems the critical piece to me.
In other words the life controlled by repressed emotion, or ridden by desire, or the live lived for accumulation of things is an inauthentic life. An unconscious life. A life lived in thrall, no matter to what, is a life shorn of its potential and shrunken in its worth. In this way I take the extreme positions of Stoicism, Buddhism and anti-materialism as signposts warning us, danger ahead. Useful, but not if taken as absolutes.
