Why this need for lists all of a sudden? I woke up thinking of Tulani‘s list, The Five Rules of Happiness, the one I read in her blog yesterday, and I immediately had to make it mine:
1.Free your heart from hatred.
2.Free your mind from worries.
3.Live simply.
4.Give more.
5.Expect less.
#3 would go a long way towards helping me become the green girl I want to be. It would, and it is also very hard to achieve. I suffer from always wanting more. Closely related is #2, and the fear of not having enough. The bag lady syndrome is a part of me that refuses to go away. How much will it take for me to finally feel secure?
Going to the mall is always a spiritual experience, the time to get in touch with my fellow human beings, and to take in the painful reality of our collective emptiness. I become both actor and witness, in an existentialist play about the absurdity of life without meaning.
#3 is actually easier to achieve than you think, but it’s not something can to be achieved with your consciousness. (Obviously you’ve tried very hard.
) When you do so consciously, you actually unconsciously press down the shopping urge for now until it explode later.
The fundamental solution to this problem is to remove the shopping urge, the desire to have more “things”. As you’ve probably come to realize, the satisfaction brought by material things is short lived. Once you “own” the thing you’ve longed for, you enjoy it a great deal for a period of time, then its thrill fades, and then you have to go on another mission to find the next “thing” to fill that excitement hole. The vicious cycle goes on and on.
The whole society encourages this consumer pattern and we in the middle don’t feel anything wrong about this habit but blindly follow it. You, on the other hand, woke up one day and realized that this is not right but feel powerless against the trend.
Actually, I was like that before. I loved high-tech toys, expensive fashion items, and cool outdoor gears. And it was impossible to press down my shopping urge; I just gotta have them or I couldn’t go on function normally. I didn’t like my shopping habit at all, but there was so little I could do about it.
But all this changed late last year, when I started searching for the meaning of life and eventually became a Buddhist. I have no intention of persuading anyone to become a Buddhist (I found that it was very unpleasant when people pushed me to join their religions), but there is a lot of wisdom in Buddha’s teachings that everyone can benefit and apply in everyday life, including killing off this irritating shopping mania silently. It wasn’t even my plan to stop having this material desire, but somehow it’s just gone. Poof. Now I look at catalogs, window displays, or the real things on co-workers, my mind is calm and I don’t feel envy or jealous at all. I don’t have to press down the shopping urge, because there is none. It’s all very strange and hard to explain, but the end result has been marvelous.
Of course, if you actually need something, not just want something, you should still get it and you feel nothing funny about the purchase. I don’t mean that you should not buy anything at all, but you certainly will develop a good purchase sense and #3 will be no longer your problem. In a way, you reach the Nirvana by not having #3 to worry about.
Thanks Amanda, for your kind and very thoughtful response. I will let it sit . . .
marguerite