Consumerism

Portia is gently purring at my feet, a strange ray of golden light is playing on the wall beside my desk, fluttering lines and leaves and blind slats throwing random, vibrating shadows before me, and my head is full of what I heard and thought today about our way of life.

As The Story of Stuff website (see attached link) describes, we are slaves to the businesses who generate stuff because they have learned how to undermine our contentment so thoroughly that we are insatiable, trying to fix ourselves with whatever it is "they" suggest might work.  But then that idea is contradicted with another, making undesirable the stuff we thought would fix us and we spent so much money on.  The most profound thing for me in this message is that it is now more important to consume and to be seen as a consumer than it is to be a good parent, a good kid, a loyal spouse, a decent person, a (fill in the blank with some worthwhile human calling).  Consumerism has consumed us.  As Todd put it, materialism has spread to our relationships, making them as disposable and upgrade-able as anything else we can buy on credit.  A musician friend said something like that as well, about the irony in many love songs that most people don't even catch - they aren't about love at all, they are commentaries on the way we work through one relationship after another, using that person until "perceived obsolescence" sets in and we decide it is unworkable.  Until a newer, better model comes along.

I feel kind of dirty after all that.  I have fallen for it.  I encourage it by being part of the problem.  So I have to figure out the balance between management of my vanity and understanding what I really need.  That will take a lot more digging than I can comprehend right now.  And I don't really want to do the work.  But I'm convicted, so I can no longer claim ignorance.

Throughout the service today, David Gentiles was asking us to clench our fists, imagining our grip on all kinds of things.  Especially consumer things.  Worry.  Control.  And he asked us to slowly open our hands, imagining letting those things go.  When I do that in my own mind, I imagine putting the issue or the person in a boat and sending it sailing away from me.  If it comes back, I have to be careful not to take it back out of the boat.  I think I need to practice this open-handedness some more.  I'm pretty grabby as a rule...so I better pick up something constructive with that hand before I try to control something or someone else with it.