I was talking with a loved one who rode out Hurricane Ike on Galveston Island on the gulf coast of Texas. The Island took a big hit with a 14-foot storm surge, 120mph winds and torrential rain. As will happen in the aftermath of a storm of this magnitude, a significant amount of the resi-dents’ possessions were destroyed. Large piles of rubbish, that only days before had been cov-eted items of ownership, were now stacked into curbside shrines to the awesome power of Mother Nature – or more appropriately, monuments to our insatiable appetite for mindless con-sumer spending.



Household items were scattered everywhere, removed from houses in their owners’ futile at-tempt to salvage what they could by drying out what the mold and humidity had not yet claimed. My loved one remarked in amazement at the sheer quantity of “stuff” everyone owned. It seemed unimaginable that people could squeeze so many “things” into their living spaces, once you saw the entire inventory on display. Where did it all go? Everyone on his block had a treadmill! Most looked brand new. (If you could see the neighbors, most probably were.) Everyone was armed, and spray-painted signs on fences warned of the dangers of thinking this was a self-service yard sale. Possessions are possessions, even if they are worthless. One of the State Troo-pers, leading two looters into the back of his car, was overheard quoting Thoreau, “Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.” I don’t think they got it.



But it is not just disasters that bring this clutter loving consciousness to the surface. How many times have you moved and asked yourself, “Where did I get all this crap?” In some insidious manner these physical objects gradually take over of our lives. Do we own our possessions or do they own us?



My first summer between college years, I moved to a beach community. There was a man there I encountered frequently who I thought was homeless. I’d see him on bus benches always wear-ing the same clothes. Leaves stuck in his hair gave him the appearance that he had just awakened from sleeping on the ground in a park. Sometimes I would see him wandering around town. He seemed to walk for miles everyday. Clearly he had no job. One of the locals branded him a ca-sualty of the 60’s who took too much LSD and never came down. His brother, who lived in town, took care of him, making sure he had food and clothes.



One morning as I was running along the beach, I saw this semi-homeless man. He had dug a large hole that cut him off at the knees when he stood in it. The locals had assured me that the man was harmless, and there was no need to be afraid of him. As I ran up and down the beach I noticed he had a long stick, and he was drawing something in the sand. Curiosity got the best of me. On my last lap, I decided to stop by and see what he was so busy creating. Upon approach-ing I introduced myself. The man looked up and smiled warmly. He had been absorbed in the task of drawing stick figures with the greatest of concentration. I did not wish to appear rude, so I pointed at one of the stick figures and complimented him on how realistic his drawing looked. The man proudly smiled and informed me this was a portrait of his brother. Then the smile slowly faded and the man shook his head sadly and said, “It’s too bad about my brother.” “What happened to him?” I inquired gently. “He has a house” came the simple answer. “He has a house?” I repeated, not sure I was following the line of tragedy. “Yes,” the man replied thought-fully. “My brother and I used to do things together and go places. Then he got a house, and now the house needs him to do things. He does not do things with me anymore, because he has to do things for the house, and he cannot go anywhere with me because the house has him.” The man continued to shake his head sadly. “I will not go into houses,” he said with resolve. “I will go to my brother’s house, but I will not go inside. Because once you go inside… that’s it… the house has you! It will always need something, and that’s how ‘it’ gets you.”



I never had the opportunity to talk with the beach artist again, but nearly twenty years later, I still cannot forget our conversation. Through what many might label a distorted perspective, this man conveyed a clear message with gravity and insight.



I have reflected back many times on that brief encounter on the beach and wondered where I was allowing the possessions in my life to own me. It has occurred to me over the years how interest-ing and revealing our use of the word “possessions” is. How many of us allow our lives to be possessed by our homes, cars or boats? God knows the women from Sex In The City were clearly possessed by their shoe collections. But this is a human issue, not a gender issue. I have seen men possessed by everything from their baseball card collections, to their garages full of tools, to the love of their life – their car.



Over a hundred years ago Henry David Thoreau, the noted transcendentalist philosopher, wrote, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” In his writings he warned of the dangers of inheriting even the fewest and simplest of objects as a way of open-ing oneself up to the type of possession we are discussing here, as another way of waking up one day to discover your life is overrun and polluted with the accumulation of “things”. Thoreau did not define poverty consciousness the way most of us do today when he wrote, “However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a gar-den herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.”



Consider that this warning came long before our ability to microchip our entire music collection on a single iPod or our entire business on a laptop. Our ability to condense our valuables into smaller and smaller spaces has only fueled our prowess and vulnerability to becoming increasing more possessed by our possessions. High-tech possession for a high-tech world.



Perhaps there is a blessing within these life-riddled catastrophes such as floods, relocations and fires that force an involuntary purging of possessions. Thoreau offers words of wisdom for those who may find themselves unwillingly separated from a lifetime of property they have worked hard to amass: “As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.”



Another unexpected gift of finding oneself materialistically stripped naked is the opportunity to revaluate what is truly important and really valuable to us. To consciously update what we want to surround ourselves with and to reconsider what is authentically worth our investment. As the great Oscar Wilde once said, “We know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”



For those readers who may be piecing their lives back together after an unexpected loss, may I leave you with one more priceless non-material gift from Thoreau: “There is no value in life ex-cept what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself”… and to my semi-homeless beach buddy out there, wherever you are, may you con-tinue to be as free as the day you were born.




About the Author:



Vaishali is the author of Wisdom Rising (Purple Haze Press 2008) and You Are What You Love (Purple Haze Press 2006). She is also national health & wellness speaker, radio host on KTLK (greater Los Angeles & Santa Barbara) and KEST (San Francisco). During her twenties and thir-ties Vaishali suffered from a vast array of emotional and medical problems, including a terminal diagnosis two times, domestic abuse and financial devastation. Her astonishing and compete re-covery of the mind, body and spirit gave her the unique ability to make Universal big picture wisdom relevant to the average person’s everyday life.



Vaishali graduated Magna Cum Laude from The University of San Francisco, Philosophy and Religion Department. She is a faculty member of The Omega institute and The Kripalu Center. Visit www.purplev.com or email press@purpelv.com

Subscribe to our HW&W List

You’re about to get ‘Insider Access’ most people will never have, to bring more Health, Wealth, and Love into your Life!…

You have Successfully Subscribed!