If you are one of the people who’d say, “No way! I own my stuff. It definitely doesn’t own me!”, let’s check out some of the ways our stuff might just be owning us right back:
After working to pay for that brand new item, after that long shopping trip to find the perfect (fill in the blank with your possession of choice); THEN we pay for it over and over with reduced space in our homes. We pay for again whenever we worry about it getting lost, or stolen or broken. We pay for it when we waste time searching for it amongst a pile of other stuff that owns our time, drains our mental energy and takes up our physical space.
Every single thing that we claim as “mine” is another thing to worry about. Whenever we use the word “my”, we are also saying this is something I cared enough about to claim, and so we now owe it our concern. We pay it with our attention. Where is it? Is it OK? Is it dirty, broken, lost? If so, that’s more work we have made for ourselves. Our lifetimes are all we really own, so paying for any thing over again with our precious time is a big deal.
Hopefully our stuff is comprised only of the things we truly deem worth of us; things that are not only very useful, but also beautiful. We wouldn’t want to allow inferior bric-a-brac to clutter our homes and detract from the awesome atmosphere we are carefully developing.
We want to come home and breathe easy, knowing that we haven’t thoughtlessly made more chores for ourselves. We can relax because we have carefully decided to keep only the things that serve to focus our intentions, elevate our mood, and assist us in our lives. We freely released the things that were weighing us down and now feel as light as air. Ahhhh.
This topic is directly related to another post entitled Ownership Illusions.