Letting Go in the Land of Stuff

We live in a world of acquisition. We measure ourselves by our numbers, like they say in the ING television commercial showing people walking around with their net worth under their arms—clever ad, and surely sad. What if they instead walked around with their happiness, spiritual or emotional bank account numbers, the lasting wealth of life, under their arms?

With acquisition being our culture’s mega-measure, is it any wonder that letting go is difficult for us? Yet all the great religions teach us to place our faith in the invisible things—in the life of the spirit, not the life of things. We die unto the ego to live the life of soul.

I don’t expect you or I will be living in voluntary poverty anytime soon. But my guess is we can all let go of some habits, some things, and come at life from a more primal and loving place of freedom. Got any obvious candidates, or non-obvious ones?  Mine would be my attachments to chai tea and certain sports on TV, for starters.  Maybe a non-obvious one is praise: doing well is fine, but waiting for recognition may not serve me.

The poet Rilke composed a line about the land of acquisition. “We are not much at home in the world we have created.” So, brother and sister strangers in this strange land, let’s carry the invisible numbers around with us and leave the ING net worth number at home. Our lives are about less, and a lot more, than that.

What can you let go of here in theLandofStuff?