Demonic Possessions

 

If all else fails, make latkes.  Well, right now it works for me. Immediately there is a house full of the food of my childhood and I am comforted by memories and flavours from my past. Sometimes I believe I was meant to be one of those old, short, round babushka peasants straight out of Fiddler on the Roof. Ah, but life would have been so simple then - just running away from Kossacks, pogroms and famine.  None of the ills of modern times - dieting, tension, stress disorders over broken down phones and fatigue caused by a journey on the London underground. In the FOTR days, I would have been tired from tilling fields, milking cows and planting crops.  All totally justifiable.
As I said, simple.

How interesting that we (and I use the word to mean me) make life so complex.  The more we have, the more problems we have.  I was talking to a friend today about throwing things away and how difficult I find it to throw away useful things, even if they are not really useful to me anymore. Take bowls, as an example.  I have at least three dozen bowls suitable for cereal, soup and porridge.  I cannot bring myself to give/throw away any of these and actually find myself looking at bowls in shops thinking that this would make the perfect breakfast bowl. Cooking pots are another thing that I seem to accumulate. The big soup pot is great, but the big spaghetti pot is similar and I think I can't do without either.  I buy new frying pans to replace the old, but somehow the old ones are still here.  I used to believe that the problem was lack of storage, but now I know that's not true.  If I had a warehouse of a kitchen, I would fill it up and have to look for more space and don't even get me started on how many pairs of shoes I need to find room for!

I have lived in this house for over twenty years. That's a long time in one place and a long time in which to accumulate things.  As I look around I do see clearly that when I am feeling overwhelmed by life I also feel very overwhelmed by all the things around me and yet, and yet, I find it almost impossible to begin the process of clearing.  This is very different from cleaning. I don't like cleaning and avoid it, but will do it when I need to. Clearing makes me crazy. I either want to throw everything away or throw nothing away.  I have had times when I went into clearing frenzies. I've thrown away cash vouchers, tickets, official forms, all in a whirlwind of "I can't stand this anymore".  I need to find a middle way.

Buddha talked of the Middle Way:
The Middle Way crystallizes the Nirvana-bound path of moderation away from the extremes of sensual indulgence and self-mortification and toward the practice of wisdom, morality and mental cultivation.

I see how much I live my life at the edges. I am rarely in the middle.  Life is up or down, good or bad, high or low, jumping from mood to mood, crisis to crisis.  No wonder I'm tired.  This bouncing around is exhausting. Moderation is so alien to me. What would my life look like with fewer possessions and less crises?  I have never created a picture of my life in that calm space.  I've spent time visualising my thinner self, my richer self, my successful self, but never my calm, unencumbered self.  Wow, I never even considered doing this. It's quite a daunting prospect and I know that I would feel better just by creating myself in this way. it is a bit scary. To live in the space in between is tempting.

We are possessed by the things we possess.
When I like an object, I always give it to someone.
It isn't generosity--it's only because
I want others to be enslaved by objects, not me.
Jean Paul Sartre