Just thinkin'...
Oct. 21st, 2002 10:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynEver notice how little you really need to be content? I mean, seriously. I'm an American. I live in one of the wealthiest nations in the world, and despite what the buggers who call themselve sour leaders are doing to it, one of the best. Our whole society is bombarded every day with messages insisting that we can't be content, let alone happy, unless we have stuff or do stuff or think stuff (usually relating to getting stuff). It can be downright amazing when you realise how much of that message is bullcrap.
A little extra warmth when it's cold, a little extra coolness when it's hot. Clothes that fit reasonably well and don't itch or invite people to attack you. Food that won't make you sick, that doesn't taste bad and maybe turns out to be something you like. Water for drinking - clean water - and extra for washing. A safe place to live, a safe place to be. Other people to associate with, without being hounded or mocked or threatened. Work to do that has meaning beyond 'something that keeps me busy'; time where the obligation of work isn't hanging over one's head, when you're free from other obligations, too. Freedom from non-vital obligations, actually.
That much for being content, I think. That's the minimum. I'm debating whether love falls under content as well, or is the first thing on the list of things required for happiness. Probably contentment, if we're talking love in a general community-type sense (forgive me, I don't remember C. S. Lewis' The Four Loves very well, so I don't know the proper term), but more personal love would fall into the happiness category... Bear in mind that I'm thinking of absolute minima here. There are people in this world who can be quite content without the company of others for long stretches of time. I doubt I'm one of them, although I enjoy solitude a great deal. I need people, although not always on the same terms as they want to deal with me (case in point: this post has been interrupted by five or six phone calls so far), and I need to feel that I am loved and to love other people (again, not always on the same terms other people think of - definitions vary so wildly that the whole thing's a minefield).
I don't know, really. I'm just thinking about this, and about how much crap I have and how much crap so many people think is important, and wondering why I let myself get all het up about this kind of stuff when so little of it is really all that important or even all that necessary. Granted, fifteen minutes from now I'll probably be frothing about how expensive something is or drooling over something I want, but I hope to steer myself back to this kind of thing and try to regain a little sanity from it.
A little extra warmth when it's cold, a little extra coolness when it's hot. Clothes that fit reasonably well and don't itch or invite people to attack you. Food that won't make you sick, that doesn't taste bad and maybe turns out to be something you like. Water for drinking - clean water - and extra for washing. A safe place to live, a safe place to be. Other people to associate with, without being hounded or mocked or threatened. Work to do that has meaning beyond 'something that keeps me busy'; time where the obligation of work isn't hanging over one's head, when you're free from other obligations, too. Freedom from non-vital obligations, actually.
That much for being content, I think. That's the minimum. I'm debating whether love falls under content as well, or is the first thing on the list of things required for happiness. Probably contentment, if we're talking love in a general community-type sense (forgive me, I don't remember C. S. Lewis' The Four Loves very well, so I don't know the proper term), but more personal love would fall into the happiness category... Bear in mind that I'm thinking of absolute minima here. There are people in this world who can be quite content without the company of others for long stretches of time. I doubt I'm one of them, although I enjoy solitude a great deal. I need people, although not always on the same terms as they want to deal with me (case in point: this post has been interrupted by five or six phone calls so far), and I need to feel that I am loved and to love other people (again, not always on the same terms other people think of - definitions vary so wildly that the whole thing's a minefield).
I don't know, really. I'm just thinking about this, and about how much crap I have and how much crap so many people think is important, and wondering why I let myself get all het up about this kind of stuff when so little of it is really all that important or even all that necessary. Granted, fifteen minutes from now I'll probably be frothing about how expensive something is or drooling over something I want, but I hope to steer myself back to this kind of thing and try to regain a little sanity from it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2002-10-21 09:56 pm (UTC)And yet the process was (mostly) painless. The biggest regrets were my books. I had to take eleven large bookshelves filed to the brim (and often overflowing) with books and pare that back to something that would fit in five, 55-pound boxes. THOUSANDS of books wound up in used book shops, hospital libraries, etc. Many of the ones that didn't make the cut were old friends of mine. It hurt quite a bit to see them go. But they had to go.
Do this to yourself once in life and you won't get attached to things ever again. Here in China I'm accumulating things, of course. But they're out the window when next I move. Only a very select few will be coming with me.