The Art of Zen Living

As the philosopher Jagger once said, you can’t always get what you want.  He did, however, go on to point out that if you try, sometimes, you get what you need.

The problem, as I see it, is that these days, Americans not only get what they need, they get what they want, but they think they need what they want.  We live in an economy created by marketing where items are designed to wear out, break or just become unusable due to the design of this year’s products being different.  We cash in for credit cards, look to our home equity as a “free money ATM”, and constantly chase The Next Big Thing.  We’re conditioned to react this way, pretty much since birth.  We accumulate more and more stuff, rent out rooms for our stuff, buy special storage containers to keep it nice, hire consultants or purchase special shelving units to turn closest into stuff-o-rama storage.

Let me put that last part a different way: we buy stuff FOR our stuff, so that our stuff will have a place to live.

I just got tired of living that way.

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Back in March, I spent a few weekends on reducing the amount of stuff that owns me. Yes, you read that right. The further along in this project I get, the more I feel like I was the one that was owned.

The first part of this journey came to be when I decided I wanted to know if I could live in a one bedroom apartment, or if I need a 2 bedroom.  I’d been living in a one bedroom only because I have a garage I paid extra for.  Lots of my stuff lived in that garage so that I could have room to live in the apartment.

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I came across this line during a dialog earlier today:

“research consistently shows that there is at least some correlation between having money and being satisfied with life.”

Can someone point me to that research? My experience and my observation in life has been that if you have enough money to meet your basic needs (food, shelter and clothing) then happiness depends on having enough money to meet your wants and desires. You have two choices - learn to make more money, or learn to want fewer things.

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Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle,
And the life of the candle will not be shortened.
Happiness never decreases by being shared

A good friend of mine made the observation that I’d been a very difficult person to buy a gift for even before I started changing my attitude towards material things. It’s an excellent question - what DO you get someone that is living simply? I put together a list of suggestions.

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*Note: this is a re-post of an article originally posted on my old blog on March 10th, 2008

Stuff. In America, we have a LOT of it. In fact, we have so much, we often pay people extra to store it for us. “Self Storage” places are everywhere.

We’re so attached to our “stuff” that we understand and validate stories like this:

“I know of one couple who couldn’t retire to the town they preferred because they couldn’t afford a place there big enough for all their stuff…“

How horrifying. To NOT retire to your dream area because you’re so attached to your “things” that you need to be sure that they have a nice place to live.

Being in a place where I’m remodeling my world view and psychology, I see both sides of this. The American consumer in me understands on an emotional level this attachment to stuff. Intellectually, I can acknowledge that it makes no sense at all, and is, in fact, outdated.

I read an interesting article a week or so ago about our attitude towards “stuff” and how it’s outdated. The author made a good point - go back and look at old pictures. From the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and even into the 70’s - don’t look at the people, look at the backgrounds. Notice how empty the houses are. There is a distinct *lack* of “stuff”. If you look at old houses, from around the turn of the century, you’ll find they didn’t have closets in the bedroom. There was no need for them - stuff was rare and valuable and often everything a person owned would fit nicely into a trunk or chest of drawers.

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