Thought for the Week: How much do we need?
Judy Clinton wonders how much she needs
The other day I passed by a garden on one of my local walks around the estates in which I live. I always enjoy looking in people’s gardens. That day I spotted a gorgeous rose overhanging the pavement. It was a deep peach colour. When I bent down to smell it a most wonderful fragrance wafted up towards me. Almost immediately my mind took me away from that rose into a multitude of thoughts. What type of rose was this? Where could I get one? I wanted one like that in my garden. Whereabouts would I put it?
Then, mercifully, I stopped myself, observing how quickly my mind had taken me off into acquisition and greed. Instead of being able to fully enjoy that rose, I had lost the delight it offered me, by wanting a rosebush of the same kind. And not only that; it was a silly line of thinking: I am already struggling to keep on top of my garden, so why would I want to add another bush that would need pruning, feeding and generally attending? How ridiculous!
I reflected further on how our media constantly urge us to have more and/or better things, which we then begin to think we actually need. In most cases, we just don’t. Nowadays, it is common for people to not only have a computer, but a tablet, a smartphone and any number of other such devices. Why? And why does every washing machine have umpteen programmes when the majority of us only ever use two or three of them? No doubt manufacturers would say that they have to make this range of choice available to their customers who have different needs. Maybe. I’m not convinced.
No wonder my poor head feels crammed with information all the time; and possibilities abound over absolutely everything. I saw myself like some great crab: mighty claws outstretched to grasp hold of everything I could see and drag it into an ever-present maw of wanting. I saw how unfulfilling and empty this way of living could be.
Of course, there is pleasure, and necessity, in having a certain number of possessions and I’m certainly not advocating a barren existence, but the ‘more, more, more’ and ‘different, better, faster’ mentality is, I believe, at the root of much suffering. It’s certainly responsible for a huge amount of debt. Just watch as Christmas comes up, with all its excesses on the one hand and the misery of not being able to provide anything on the other. Our society, has, I sense, gone astray – and I am far from innocent.
Getting back to my rose – had I savoured it fully, maybe appreciated the tender care that the gardener had put into its beautiful and healthy condition, and walked on, I suspect I would have come away much lighter, filled somehow, and without giving myself the extra work of procuring one for myself. Who knows, someone else might have been walking past my garden and appreciated my roses without them needing to get ones like them for their gardens. We would all have been richer and appreciative without the need to possess. Where else can I watch this behaviour in my life? How much do I actually need? This, I suspect, is what our Quaker testimony to simplicity is all about.
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