Heavy possessions

A much needed simple living movement has been growing. People living in rich Western societies starting to realize that having more things didn't make them any happier. Not only it didn't make them happier, it actually decreased the quality of our life. The more stuff we have, the more stress we feel. Shopping became a new form of distraction drug. We buy stuff in a state of half awareness, and we wake up to find more things that clutter our life and we don't know why we bought them in the first place.

One saying of Prophet Muhammad keeps coming back to my mind, brief and to the point of this human misery. It's hard to render it in English and keep it's original brief power, but he simply said that having less stuff that gives us what we need is better than having much stuff that ends up distracting us.

The truth is, we feel more fulfilled with less, clear things. Once things increase in number, we start to loose control and loose track. We start actually loosing them. A place in our heart will keep worrying about those rarely used items. Our heart knows better. May be it worries how our world is going wrong, when we have things that we don't use, while other humans are in dire need of those same things. We fill our plate at this open buffet, but we never get to finish it all. The food goes to the trash. Trash full of food in one place; human stomachs empty of food in another. That's an insane paradox, totally unhuman.

If we really want to enjoy things, we actually need to have less of them. That's a proven fact. Some experiments found that children given too many toys to choose from lost interest and were lost and bored, while those given a fewer number were engaged and satisfied. I don't mean we don't have nice things. In fact, since we will buy less stuff, we can then invest in the ones that we really, really like and enjoy. We get less, higher quality stuff. Every piece will matter to us, and will have a place in our heart.