An observation by Subhan
When was the last time you checked out the clothes in your closet? How many items have you not worn in the last six months (excluding those that are worn in certain seasons and not in others)? Why do you keep items that you seem to always skip over when choosing what to wear?
This is an intriguing part of how the mind operates. It doesn’t want to wear something, but it doesn’t want to get rid of it either… because you might wear it sometime.
And this doesn’t stop with clothes. How about all those things in the basement? Or in the garage? Or in that drawer in the kitchen? Or all the pens you have? Or the dishes and cups and glasses that languish in the back of your shelves?
There’s a great learning – and adventure – ahead when you become willing to really explore why you keep so many things. People even spend money to put some of these things in storage, without ever bothering to recognize that, for the most part, you never use them, either before or after they are stored!
Experience the resistance to parting with these unused items. Could it be that we identify ourselves with what we own? That we somehow feel more worthy, more approvable, if we have more things? And where does fear come in to this equation? Perhaps the fear that someday in the future we may need this thing, so don’t get rid of it? If we do, we’ll just have to spend money to get another one?
The truth is that even if we got another thing, soon it would be sitting on the un-reclaimed pile of things we still don’t use!
So this is a fertile place to look at how the mind functions. And how it defies logic and refuses to see what it is actually doing. It’s a great adventure to see it, and understand the workings of the mind. And to realize how it constantly creates situations that do not enhance the quality of life!
This article was first posted on Facebook – reproduced here with the author’s permission
Featured image (detail) credit to Hsin-Ju Cheng
Related article
- Comfort Zone, or, a meditation on Stuff – Zenning backwards, we find out how many possessions we are truly comfortable with. A trance journey – by Madhuri
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