He Who Dies With The Most Toys...
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| From Morguefile |
I found this quote the other day:
Every increased possession loads us with new weariness. -John Ruskin, author, art critic, and social reformer (1819-1900)
I remember a home security system commercial where a guy says something like, "I can finally go on vacation and really relax.' You know, he can't relax on vacation unless he knows that his stuff at home is safe and sound. We have too much stuff.
I get what Ruskin (who was quite a character) is trying to say, assuming he said this*. New things, more things, they weigh us down in so many ways. Yet we go on accumulating, don't we? I have seven guitars, yet I still talk about getting another. Why?** We get bigger houses, TVs, smaller phones, replace our iPads (heck, three years ago they didn't even EXIST) with the next generation, get smarter phones, smarter cars, and on and on it goes. For what?
I talked with a guy a while ago. He was clearing out his aunt's house. He said she had saved everything and he had to go through everything because she would squirrel away money in weird places. But he said she saved EVERYTHING - cancelled checks from 1947, tax returns from the 70s, you name it. And at one point he looked a these big piles of papers and junk and thought about his aunt and thought, "Is that all a life is? Is that all it comes down to? Just piles of leftover stuff that someone goes through when you're gone?"
We SAY no...but we LIVE...yes. We live as if the chief aim of life is to get one more thing, one more toy, one more bauble... and then we live with the weariness of ownership. Maintenance, storage, usage (or neglect), etc, etc.
We need a certain amount of stuff...but most everybody I know has too much - and in some ways we suffer from this stuff-gluttony...
Solution? It's not just a simple matter of "get rid of some stuff" - we have to think differently, we have to live differently, we have to BE different...
For me, that's a Holy Spirit moment. I can't do it. I can't let go of my stuff. I need the Holy Spirit to empower me to do it. I have to be willing (God doesn't impose His will on us, I get that) but I just can't do it on my own...
So I need to pray....
*While I can't prove he said/wrote it, I can't disprove it, either. I really wish people would put sources with the quotes they put online...sigh...
**Well, actually, you know different guitars sound different, play different - I've got two Strats and they sound RADICALLY different - and the Epiphone hollow body is something else entirely. The acoustics (I've got three) have radically different tones, too, though I generally only use two of them. So, while I don't technically NEED a Tele or an SG (or maybe a Paul), I don't have one and they DO sound really, really different from what I've got :)***
***Actually, we're looking at mandolins and git-jos or banjitars or whatever you call those six-string banjos that play like guitars but sound like banjos... :)
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