Having to move during the Christmas season makes one pause

Over the past two weeks, in preparation for my six months sojourn in Singapore, moving has become a preoccupation. First I had to pack up my temporary office at 4620 Wisconsin Avenue. I will miss the solitude of this spacious but windowless cubicle that provided a quiet oasis for my computer modeling work. The second move, from Dormgrandpop’s 101 Anderson Hall apartment was more arduous. Here, I was dealing with seven years of accumulated ‘stuff’ plus recent additions from my Center for Teaching Excellence and 4620 Wisconsin Offices. Culling and packing accumulations of one’s past - books, pictures, clothing, mementos and miscellaneous items compels one to choose: move to a new location, temporarily store, give away, or discard. I experienced flashbacks to the process of helping siblings purge my father’s apartment, shortly, after his death two years, ago. Some accumulations there spanned a lifetime, though periodically attritted by purgings from previous moves. I could also more closely empathize with students and their parents who, each spring, face the task of purging residence hall (dormitory) rooms for pre-summer vacation trip home.

But packing up and purging one’s accumulated stuff during the Christmas season raises issues that packing up at other times of the year does not. As one is sorting through gifts and purchases - some unused - from previous years, the commercial juggernaut that America’s winter solstice festival has become is relentlessly, every minute of every day, urging us to buy more.

Is it possible to show love and appreciation during the Christmas season, without transmittal of newly purchased material goods? Advertisers would have you believe the answer is ‘NO’ and, mostly, we have accepted their way of thinking. But having to purge gifts from previous years, while listening to this year’s electronic blandishments urging new purchases at least makes one pause. How much happiness-value-added did the goods I am now discarding really provide. The metaphor I would use for much gift receiving is drug addiction. There is a quick exciting ‘rush,’ but often followed by withdrawal. The pain of withdrawal must be assuaged by additional gifts or purchases. Bernie Madoff’s seventeen Rolex watches, recently auctioned off, provides an egregious illustration.

My experiment, this Christmas season, has been gift recycling. This has included giving away some of my most treasured books and artifacts as well as some items for which I have no use. For two friends facing real hardship or need, significant sums of money seemed an appropriate gift. It would be an exaggeration to say that this has transformed my life, let alone America’s winter solstice commercial extravaganza. But at the least it will help simplify the purging process in future moves both for me and, after my demise, for those who must sort through my remaining possessions.

A cost effective path to happiness

I was listening yesterday to an NPR segment on ‘extreme sports.” It described the exploits of a skier - I can’t recall his name - who may have been responsible for coining the term. His feat is was climb to the top of precipitous cliffs in snow covered mountainous regions and ski down them. A single lapse of focus or insurmountable obstacle in his path meant instant death. In justifying this risk-taking, he described the “high” the “total focus” the “adrenalin rush” that this feat produced. And having completed one feat, it was not enough. Like Alexander the Great, he soon felt compelled to seek new worlds to conquer.

Many of us can cite similar, though less dramatic,‘highs,’ They are membered as notable, transient way-stations on a never ending quest for experiences of happiness and fulfillment. I can remember the moment I knew that the best - and most unconventional book - I ever coauthored would be completed. The first time I viewed my first child is another deeply etched, never-to-be forgotten high. First consummating a deep, passionate relationship is another.

In technologically advanced wealthy societies, the quest for happiness has become commodified and commercialized. In America, Christmas Season may be the best example. As the day set aside to commemorate the birth of Jesus Christ draws near, merchants, economists and politicians wait anxiously to see whether “consumers” will make the requisite 20 per-cent of the year’s purchases necessary to keep the economy healthy. Expensive hobbies, expensive hotels, expensive vacations all seem to be part of the elusive quest. Expensive watches are featured advertising subjects in the Economist magazine, which I read regularly. Typically, those pictured wearing them are sports stars (Tiger Woods) or handsome, somewhat disdainful young men, escorting beautiful young women in elegant surroundings. Clearly the purpose of these beautifully crafted timepieces is not to tell the time. One only need read the headlines in supermarket checkout tabloids to realize that the quest for happiness of young men and women who look like those is the advertisements is often elusive.

It must be my current exposure to the Dali Lama’s thinking, via his audio book, The Universe in a Single Atom, that keeps bringing Buddhist themes to mind. Lord Buddha’s teaching reminds us that the origin of suffering is attachment, in particular desire, passion and the striving for wealth, fame and popularity. Though the book is not about meditative practice, it reminds readers that meditative practice is an important discipline whose mastery can alleviate suffering and achieve happiness. Buddhist theories of consciousness maintain that our mental states, including suffering and happiness have causes. We can alter our mental states, the theories assert, by mastering the ability to alter their causes.

My beginner’s skills in meditative practice leave much to be desired, but I have learned two lessons. First, they can be put to use almost anywhere. Doctors’ and airport waiting rooms are places where meditations on breathing and single-pointedness seem particularly appropriate. Second, they require little in the way of commercially traded paraphernalia. I do use a standard issue candle, candle holder and small stone Buddha statue in my apartment. Total cost, less than $15. In waiting rooms, no paraphernalia is needed (though a set of ear plugs can be helpful).

Meditative practice may not be the only path to happiness - there is always, yachting, costly vacations, first class travel, expensive watches, and extreme sports. My purpose is not to denigrate these pursuits, but only to suggest an alternative if funds are limited or the satisfactions those options produce turn out to be transient.

Reflections on the day before Christmas

Our house in rural Virginia, where I often spend weekends and holidays, includes a “silo.” Silo is in quotes because it only looks like one. Once, a dairy barn stood where the house now stands. It included a sixteen foot diameter Silo, which we hoped to incorporate into our new dwelling.The restoration was too costly, so we built a new one on the site of the old. Why must it be that it is so often more expensive to tear down old things, however beautiful or functional, and replace them with new, rather than preserving the old?

My study is on the second floor of the new silo. It would be difficult to imagine a more perfect setting for reflection and writing. From four windows, I can see paddock fences, standing stalls for horses and, more distantly, the homes of four neighbors. This morning, I arose early for a period of meditation and reading. I shared the experience of twilight becoming daylight with a family of four deer.

This year’s end, I set for myself the goal of a non commercial Christmas. Surprisingly this is not so difficult. I have no television, listen only to public radio, podcasts and audio books. I stayed away from shopping malls. My principal presents were checks and donations to the Heifer project. This lifestyle is more difficult for families with young children. Children are principal targets of commercialism’s blandishments. Parents want to “do the right thing.” Post Christmas day comparisons, responding to the question, “what did you get?” can be invidious.

Now, many of the toys that parents buy for their children are made in nations of the Global South. Not infrequently, children may be part of that manufacturing process. Their parents could not afford to buy the toys their children, though they might not want to either. It might be good if each toy was accompanied by a picture of who made it and under what circumstances.

I have been listening to an audiobook entitled “The Universe in a Single Atom” authored by the Dali Lama. It is a deep probing into the relationship between western and Buddhist views of science, consciousness and ethics. Fundamental to Buddhist thought is the “Four Noble Truths”

The four noble truths, briefly summarized, are these:
(Quoted from: http://www.thebigview.com/buddhism/fourtruths.html)

1. Life means suffering.
To live means to suffer, because the human nature is not perfect and neither is the world we live in. During our lifetime, we inevitably have to endure physical suffering such as pain, sickness, injury, tiredness, old age, and eventually death; and we have to endure psychological suffering like sadness, fear, frustration, disappointment, and depression.

2. The origin of suffering is attachment.
The origin of suffering is attachment to transient things and the ignorance thereof. Transient things do not only include the physical objects that surround us, but also ideas, and -in a greater sense- all objects of our perception. Ignorance is the lack of understanding of how our mind is attached to impermanent things. The reasons for suffering are desire, passion, ardour, pursuit of wealth and prestige, striving for fame and popularity, or in short: craving and clinging

3. The cessation of suffering is attainable.
The cessation of suffering can be attained through nirodha. Nirodha means the unmaking of sensual craving and conceptual attachment. The third noble truth expresses the idea that suffering can be ended by attaining dispassion. Nirodha extinguishes all forms of clinging and attachment.

4. There is a path to the cessation of suffering.
There is a path to the end of suffering - a gradual path of self-improvement, which is described more detailed in the Eightfold Path. It is the middle way between the two extremes of excessive self-indulgence (hedonism) and excessive self-mortification (asceticism); and it leads to the end of the cycle of rebirth.