Sunday Story...My Stuff

First a note:
To all of you who comment on these stories…THANK YOU. I live for your comments. And I am not always able to answer each of you, so my apologies. I will get better. Please keep commenting.

Sunday Story…My Stuff
I have stuff. Lots of stuff. We all have stuff. Lots of stuff. Look around your life and check out all the stuff you have. In a world where having more than one pair of shoes makes me wealthy I am a millionaire and some of my friends, well, let’s say they are on the Warren Buffet/Bill Gates scale. The same goes for cars, clothes, TVs, and electronic gadgets (including the one I am using to write this on!). How much stuff do we really need? Do we really need any more stuff? We all know our stuff can’t follow us past this life. Most of our stuff won’t be any good in a few months or years. What do you have today that you had 10 years ago? Not much I would guess. And of the stuff you have had more than 10 years how often are you still enjoying it?

BUT…this is not the stuff I want to talk about today. The stuff in the paragraph above is the clutter and detritus of your modern life. My stuff is the stuff I am carrying around with me every day. My preconceived notions and ideas about the “way things should be.” My beliefs about myself and the world around me. It was not that long ago that the majority of people believed the world was flat. That is the stuff I am talking about. Humans are “meaning” making machines. We love to have things with meaning. Over the course of my life things have happened. All kinds of things. I have chosen to interpret or create meaning for those events. The meaning I assigned to those events becomes My Stuff.

How much of My Stuff is still serving me? In my garage, I have a pair of polished cow horns. You know the kind I am talking about…huge, about 4 feet from tip to tip, highly polished, the sort you might see in a ranch house over the fireplace, or on the front of a big ole Cadillac in Texas. These horns were pretty cool and very decorative when I lived on a ranch in the middle of nowhere Nevada. Now they are collecting dust in my garage, as they really don’t fit in with the asian-buddha décor in my current home. Those horns are no longer serving me. The opinions of myself I formed when I was 4 years old no longer serve me. The attitudes I created to protect my ego when I was 13 may not be the best attitudes for my adult self to be walking around with. This is the My Stuff I should be inspecting and jettisoning if it no longer serves me.

We often say “seeing is believing”. I want to see it in front of me before I want to believe it. So why, when you look in the mirror and see an adult looking back at you, do you let the little child hiding in the back of your psyche control and manipulate your life? We live in a world with abundant resources for knowledge and personal growth. There are so many places for you (and I) to go to create new meanings for the various events in our lives. There is no reason for any of us to stay mired in the mud of self pity and infantile attitudes. Actually now that I just wrote that…there is reasons for you to stay stuck in your My Stuff…it’s easy and it’s comfortable. It does not require you to do anything. If you want to lose some of your “My Stuff”, you will have to get off the couch, put the remote down and DO something. And the first thing you will have to do is take a look and see what sort of “My Stuff” you have been carrying around all these years. And then decide if any of it is really serving you, helping you create the life you want to live. After you open that door the rest is simple. Not easy but simple. Create new stories for the things that happened in your life. Take responsibility for what happened; it is your life after all.

This is part and parcel of the work required of us as humans. This is the evolution of your soul. How many stories have I sent you of people doing amazing things in spite of challenging things in their lives. Remember Nick the man with no arms? Amazing. The kid with cancer whose “make a wish wish” wasn’t Disney land or a Sports figure but to create a foundation for an orphanage in Africa to have a school? By the way, Make a wish had a real problem with that one…apparently they just had a hard time getting their stuff around it. What makes those individuals Stuff different than the next person with the same challenges? It is the story they are telling themselves…the Stuff they are carrying.

My Stuff is mine. I get to decide if I am going to keep it and let it run my life. Or not. Maybe My Stuff needs to be thrown out in favor of some new “My Stuff”. Get some modern stuff that will serve the person I am today and the person I want to be tomorrow and next week and next year. I get to work on My Stuff. Or not. My Decision. Your Decision.

Namaste

John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”