Emotional Attachment to Objects

What is your deep reason for attachment to objects? 

Do you ever notice your attachments to objects such as a cool sweater, a new gadget or any other thing that would make you feel bad if you lost it. Sometimes it's an object that has been part of our lives for a long time or just a short while. Sometimes it's an object that we've just acquired and have always wanted in our lives. Whatever the case, we all get attached to objects in our lives and we resist letting go of these objects to allow new things to come into our lives.

This morning I received a call that required me to act immediately on some matter or else there would be some sort of consequence. The situation required me to find a resource which I do not have access to at the moment. I guess the caller did this to jolt me into some kind of action or perhaps even make me panic. I did not want to panic then and neither do I want to panic ever (the temptation is always there though).

I sat down after the call and thought about the situation. I do not like receiving such calls and I certainly do not like to panic about something that I have no control over. Recently I also attended a business seminar and one of the things discussed was that we should get rid of the messes in our lives, whether physical, psychological or spiritual. These messes affect the smooth running of our lives and in my opinion actually indicate how smoothly our lives are running in the first place. It was also suggested that we should set a monthly goal to clean up the messes little by little. I consider the situation discussed during the phone conversation a mess in my life.

Life is about creating new paths. 

I then looked around my house and all the objects that are in it. I asked myself whether some of these objects are a mess in my life at the moment. Of course there is some clutter that I've put off throwing away for some time, but I was actually considering other, still useful objects, ones that I still use; the convenient ones.

I asked myself, "What is the deep reason for being attached to these objects? What am I or other members of my family afraid of, such that we cannot do without these objects which we don’t really need or are just cluttering our home and our lives?" I thought of the situation where someone goes out to buy objects that they don’t really need and pile them up in their home after a short period of use. Then they move onto the next purchase.

No object will ever satisfy your soul. - Dave Ramsey

Some people don't necessarily go out and purchase new things all of the time, but keep things in their lives long after their usefulness. I suppose the system of hand-me-downs, often used by low income families, also causes people to hold onto objects, where it is out of necessity that clothes, shoes etc are kept and handed down to siblings. My point here is that it is human nature to cling onto objects whether we actually need them or not.

There's need to consciously consider our attachment to objects because holding onto them might cause clutter in our homes, our minds and in our whole beings. The attachment to these objects might be the reason that new and more exciting possibilities don't easily come our way, either materially, emotionally or spiritually.

Can I find the strength to let go of the attachments I have to 'my' objects and give them away or get rid of them? What if I take the opportunity to clear my life of all the unnecessary objects in my life? Maybe if I can find the strength then I'll be able to get rid of all the other 'objects' which I had intended to get rid of in the first place. And if I have to get rid of objects, not necessarily because they are creating a mess in my life, but because I want to start afresh and make room for something new, can I find the strength then?

Come back to this blog to find out what I did and whether something new actually materialised for my family and I.

Be blessed,
Sam

Love the Life you Live, Live the Life you Love

You wake up one day and you realise that something is wrong. You don't feel quite right. You think about your life and realize you've been sailing in the wrong direction, without a rudder or navigation system and you've gotten lost. Somewhere along the line the dreams and desires you formulated when you were still young and inexperienced in the intricacies of life have almost been forgotten - shelved away in the recesses of the mind. Life has happened and the once promising future you looked forward to has given way to a mundane, almost miserable living, that does not inspire one to live a life full of joyful.

That happened to me. As a child I grew up with a reasonably provided-for life. The first eight years of my life were in a rural part of a country which had been colonized since 1890. During that part of my life I experienced the last part of a war of liberation that had been going on for about 30 years. I saw and experienced things that no child should ever have to experience. Those experiences I shall look back on in another blog article.

Despite the circumstances of those years my father provided very adequately for the family. My older sister was able to attend school at a very reputable mission school and we were able to afford the basics of life and lived in relative comfort. Our happiness did not depend on the possessions we had but on the fact that we had family and everyone did their part in the best way they knew how and we just got on with the business of living despite the war going on.

When the war ended in 1980, we looked forward to a new way of life and that's when my father decided to move the family into town. Our whole way of life changed for the better and we had the opportunity to experience new ways of living and once forbidden opportunities - attending once whites-only schools, living in areas where you could have only gone if you were going to work as a gardener or maid. I could say that I almost took for granted the privileges that my father never had when he was growing up. He was able to provide a whole new way of living that I'd never dreamt off. Beforehand, my world was limited to the experiences I'd had in the bushes and by the streams of my life in the rural areas. Then, the only thing I really looked forward to was going on a trip into town and the opportunity to have a meat pie and a bottle of soda. My favourite flavour was Fanta Orange, and yes... it is still bottled in this part of the world.

My schooling was great. I remember the first white person I sat next to in class. Her name was Odette and I'm in contact with her through social media, almost 23 years later. I remember the first (and last) person who bullied me at school. His name was Louis and again I'm in contact with him.

My journey through junior and high school was filled with many wonderful and life-changing experiences, including evolving from being a sickly, slightly chubby asthmatic child, to a fully participating sportsman, learning how to play bridge and attending ballroom dancing classes, breaking bones during sporting activities. It was a rich life in terms of experiences and exposure to all that life could be. It filled my mind with all sorts of possibilities and I was not afraid to experience new things or to experiment and discover. I was the first in my immediate family to have the experience of attending university and I thought that nobody could stop me now. In my youth I had a lot of hopes and dreams, and despite that I didn't have any idea how all of it was going to be realised, I knew I had it in me to find a way to implement my ideas.

One other factor I must mention here is that I never thought much about what my passions were. My parents were both educators and as I watched them work (sometimes helping), I vowed to myself that I didn't want to ever be an educator. I focused mainly on what I didn't want to be but never gave much thought to my real passion. I assumed that all would be taken care of when the time came. Although I knew that there was a whole world out there for me to explore, I never searched deeper to see where I fitted in. As I explored the world around me, I was aware that there were a whole lot of problems to solve in the world and I began to formulate ideas as to how I was going to contribute to solving some of them.

The opportunity to go to university came in the form of a teaching bursary. The country needed more teachers of a high calibre and I was offered a bursary to attend university outside of the country, get a degree in subjects that really interested me, and then come back to my home country to teach. I gladly took up this opportunity, thinking that I would only be bonded in the profession for a short while and then I'd be able to change careers after that. After all, teaching was in my blood. My parents were teachers and my grandfathers and some of my uncles were church ministers. I was told I had a natural ability as an educator. I latched at the opportunity as it even included a stint outside the country, and I'd never been out of the country before.

To cut a long story short, this resulted in a 15 year career in teaching, where recently I asked myself, "Where am I going with this?" I'm not bashing teaching, and for those of you in teaching or intending to teach, this is not meant to dissuade you. I was merely asking the question of myself to find myself again.

I have enjoyed most of my years in teaching and have learnt a lot. I appreciate all that it has taught me and I can have no regrets about the path my life has taken thus far. I think I've learned some skills which I'm going to have to use, and further refine, in whatever direction my life will take from now. At this particular juncture I just have to revisit those days where I remember being inspired to be imaginative and creative. I have to return to the days of exploring and finding out more about myself, the world around me and what I can do to contribute to it. I have to find my passion, mission and song, and as author and entrepreneur Brendon Burchard aptly puts it, at the end of my life I want to able to say that I lived gratefully, l loved graciously and I mattered - my life had purpose.

So, on this blog we will celebrate anything and everything in life. I will listen and look around me and anything which inspires me to write about my gratitude for it in my life, will end up here. I want to celebrate life and instead of expecting life happen to me. I want to use the power of that gratitude to inspire the creation of more to be grateful for in my life as well as anyone that reads the material.

If you come back here often, you will laugh, you might cry, but most of all I hope you'll be inspired to live your life in gratitude and to create a life that you can be grateful for.

With love and gratitude always,
Sam.