Too Many Things
17/June/2010 Filed in: Jottings
From time to time I look at all the things in my room and wish I could escape to a monastery: a nice, minimalist monastery, with plain wooden floors, clean white walls and not much else. Then I remember that I am IN a monastery, and the thick clutter of things which so irritates me is there because it is necessary. It is what enables me to do my work. However much I long for the Cistercian emptiness of the imagination, I am stuck with the Benedictine messiness of actual life. The stacks of paper, the machines, the boxes and files in which I regularly lose important items and which crowd round my bed like a pack of wolves menacing an intruder, are not going to go away. They are part of what constitutes monastic life in the twenty-first century.
Isn’t it strange how we always seem to want what we cannot have? My desire to have less is only a variation on the desire to have more. At the root of both is a self-centred dissatisfaction with life as it is, which is probably much more reprehensible than I am prepared to admit. The one thing I can say in my favour is, wanting to get rid of things rather than acquire them does make for some interesting trips to the local dump.
Isn’t it strange how we always seem to want what we cannot have? My desire to have less is only a variation on the desire to have more. At the root of both is a self-centred dissatisfaction with life as it is, which is probably much more reprehensible than I am prepared to admit. The one thing I can say in my favour is, wanting to get rid of things rather than acquire them does make for some interesting trips to the local dump.