The richer I got the simpler I became Until I had nothing and belonged to everything.
Is it possible to own anything, really? Do we own things? Our houses, our cars, our phones? We pay for them, yes. We live in them, drive them, use them–but do we own them? Does the key we are being handed–to the house, to the car–open something or close something?
I long for something: a new house, a new car, a new shirt. This longing builds until perhaps I consummate the desire. But then it kindles again, forward, pointing at something else. The house I fantasized about, once I occupy it, becomes situated no longer as the desired future but the experienced present and before long I am looking at houses again. This one doesn't have a pool. It doesn't have so many things. Can it truly satisfy me?
What is the shape of this restless hunger for the next thing? Is it conquest mind, draped in the mundane clothes of a post-conquest world? The wanting never goes away, and so I harness myself to it, the pursuit. I go into debt. I rack up credit cards. Leash my body to the treadmill of professional ascension. Yet even as I acquire I become somehow less free, somehow more determined. I have to maintain all of these things. I have to pay all of the bills. My time is more and more encumbered by the requirements to maintain this grand edifice of acquisition.
The things? They rust and rot and become obsolete, require perpetual upkeep, perpetual turnover. My new Iphone has been replaced by the next version. Last-year's jeans have the wrong waist: they are no longer fashionable. The boat that was so enticing sits in the yard. Before I had the boat all I could imagine was weekends on the water, but now, once it has crossed the threshold from the desired to the realized, my restless attention turns elsewhere. The boat that took up so much imaginal space recedes and I forget that I have it for months at a time, am reminded only by an accidental glance out the window into the sideyard where the masts of its sails protrude skyward like forlorn ascetic crosses marking unnamed graves.
I don't really have a boat. I am speaking in hypotheticals, but I am speaking to a pattern I notice in myself. Something we yearn for that never satisfies, hovers just out of reach, a desire that, when consummated recedes and yet rises up again, elsewhere, unsatisfied. I sense we are in the realm, with ownership, of addiction. A motion of enclosure, an attempt at possession that is the distortion of some deeper more primal gesture of intended intimacy somehow gone awry, refracted through the logic of narcissism.
I sense also that this addiction is not indigenous to my heart, but something I have learned, something I have been trained into, something smuggled across the borders of my psyche as the caravan of modernity makes its way across the liminal space between past and future, being and becoming. Something the horse traders slipped in unnoticed, conjured across the porous boundary between longing and satisfaction, something errant that was slipped in and when I noticed it was told to me was a-historical. As though it had always been this way…
What is the impulse at the root of the root of wanting more stuff? What is the ontogeny of acquisition? Is it possible that consuming is a substitute for something, that there is some sleight of hand at play that tricked me into trading my time for trinkets? The peddler wanders into town, from beyond the pale, a strange man, unshoulders his pack, and draws out treasures, displaying them before me with elaborate hand gestures. Oh, how I long for them. How much for this, Elon? How much for that, Jeff? I trade my time for dollars and place them in his hand, and I am the owner of this fabulous jewel. The traders move on. I look down at my hand, and the jewels have turned to dust and suddenly I am older. I thieved my own time chasing a mirage. Has this ever happened to you? Have you ever given away your sovereignty in exchange for objects? Why do we do that?
Do we own our bodies? Does the body that I am wearing belong to me? Certainly I am the host of an ecology. I cannot digest even the food that makes its way down my throat without the help of an entire micro-biome of allies. Is there a cost to the notion of ownership when applied to the self? I didn’t build this body–it was loomed, rather, on the spindle of DNA, forged in the belly of my mother, in an inner ocean, she who is both a radically specific being, and a manifestation of the great mothering that gives birth to us all. I am told by an Unangan (Aleut) Elder that there is a womb at the center of the universe.
And so this body– Is it mine? Any of it, in the sense of ownership? Is it possible, rather, that I am, as the Sufi proverb suggests…
You are entrusted with everything and entitled to nothing.
-Sufi Proverb
There was a time when I thought that my body belonged to me. A time when I was under the impression– never something I was told outright, but something again smuggled into my psyche by modernity– that it belonged to me. But if it belonged to my conscious mind, it would not break down in ways I do not understand, thrive in ways I cannot explain, and know things my cognition cannot grasp.
Who even, if we deepen into this, is the ME that thought the body was its property? And yet, I ingress. Let us bring the gaze back to the obvious in this inquiry, to this motion of scarcity mind and what is represents.
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