Its an interesting thing where humans as individuals, place their importance in life…..how much they worry about money( which seems to increase with the damn stuff itself), how much they concern themselves with how others see them, ( which seems to expand in proportion to how poorly they feel they are negotiating their own lives), to how much energy they expend belittling others or rousing on others, ( which seems to directly relate to how much smarter than themselves they think the individual they are belittling is!) Some place importance in business success, career promotion, better cars, bigger houses, most up to date computers and how much botox they need to pretend to themselves that aging isn’t a process…….others care about the footy or cricket score, drinking themselves silly on weekends ( or more often) and how smashed they were ( which they see as an ego boost??)….still others again, place importance on personal power, be it physical, fiscal or via real merit……….
On reflection, none of these things seems all that important…certainly not so when you consider Global warming, pollution in general, starving individuals in North Africa, dying and mutilated children and adults in war torn countries across the globe and the individuals in our own society suffering neglect, poverty, brutality or prejudice at the hands of either society as a whole or other individuals…….( all situations I might add that are fixable and are often not fixed because they are caused and perpetuated by arbitrary importances placed by other individuals or societies on power, ego and personal gain)……or more simply because other importances ( often synthetic and gratuitous ones) take precedence.
Day to day and moment to moment we all shift in what we consider to be important….it might be because we feel our own egos threatened or because we desire to please someone else and their sense of what is important come into play, or because we find ourselves assailed with different external images of our world….. but these are the fleeting importances and often do not directly affect the course of our lives……where we spend most of our time and energy and the intent behind this and what we do when time and energy are available to us is the stuff I am concerned with….where we find our minds wandering in the quiet spaces of the day….to the footy score…what wine we’ll have with dinner…our next hair appointment….who has annoyed us recently and what we’d really like to do to them…..why our lives are so difficult and whose fault it is…..what we’re going to spend our money on…….and so on…….
This is where we place our importance….and truly, when it all boils down, only we can tell if we believe these things to be fair and reasonable places to put our individual senses of importance….I guess what 'I' am trying to do is as my new years resolution implied…find the empty spaces in my day, my self and my mind or take the over-full spaces and unclutter them…..so that only things of value( and I realize this is a subjective term) fill them…….I want to concern myself primarily, simply, only with what is really and I mean really, important to me in each moment.
Only then can I be honest (I mean truly honest with myself) in the living of my life…..and I can choose activities that reflect this sense of what I believe is important……I also will not waste time and energy being annoyed about some small issue or trying to facilitate some unworthy project…..self-doubt and ego ramblings can take up less space (I say less because lets face it I am human and making them disappear entirely could be impossible!)….and in being kind to myself, I may just find it easier to be kind to others in turn……Chinese philospher, Lin Yutang says“Time is useful because it is not being used. Leisure is like unoccupied floor space in a room…it is that unoccupied space which makes a room habitable, as it is our leisure hours which make our life endurable”.
In other words….’Those who are wise won’t be busy, and those who are too busy can’t be wise.’
If we all made it important to attain less clutter in our spaces by paring off the unimportant then who knows……at the very least it would facilitate a society of individuals who were less dissatisfied with their lot! Don’t get me wrong, it would not necessarily be a happy smiley world all of a sudden, because some important things might be to protest about what we feel strongly is wrong with things…or to speak our truths no matter the consequences or to fight for what we believe in (provided we are certain about that and all its attendant consequences!) But at least we could eliminate a good portion of individual ego, because when you know why you do what you do and when you do what you do for yourself alone and not for an idea of how you should be or how you would like others to see you, then you are right with your ego, and the consequence may be that you don’t need to find and feed that darned ego by making another’s life harder. Spaces are easier to come by and leisure can be appreciated because you are not filling it all up with unnecessary or unwarranted clutter……
Now let me relay a little story….. (It’s not so little actually!!)
There was a scholar who had thoroughly studied a holy book( I could pick one but lets face it its abitrary) who for many years, considered himself an expert, traveling far and wide delivering discourses on the teachings of this book.
The scholar’s ultimate desire was to deliver a lecture on the Book at a certain holy city , which was the sanctum sanctorum of learning.
The King of this city eventually invited the scholar to deliver a discourse on the holy book in his court. All the wise men assembled to hear the Scholar, but just as he began to speak the King interrupted him and told him to read the book one more time in the evening and deliver his discourse the next day. The Scholar was furious but he had no choice but to comply with the king’s wishes.
As he read with full concentration in the evening, he realized some new meanings and updated his speech accordingly.
Next day the same thing happened – the moment the scholar began to speak the King interrupted him and told him to read the book once more and then come the next day to give his lecture.... and again as the Scholar read he comprehended some new wisdom – something he hadn’t perceived before. So he incorporated his new findings and proceeded to deliver his talk.
Once again the same thing happened...the king interrupted him and told him to read once more before he gave his discourse.......and again the scholar discovered some new wisdom.
This cycle went on for days and days till the scholar realized how ignorant he was and how much more there was to learn from the holy book that he gave up the idea of delivering the discourse and decided to totally devote his entire efforts to the study of the holy book.
It’s the same with any great book.Every time you read it, something new emerges, and you realize you have so much more to learn from it. And to take the liberty of extending the analogy further, it’s the same with life…….we think we have it in the bag, only to realise there is so much more to learn…what is important one day may need to be revised the next……but as long as we are aware we are learning we are no longer ignorant, as long as we are aware of what we are doing and why, and as long as we are prepared to revise we are again right with our ego and are allowing ourselves to grow……as long we keep some open spaces we are able to see the trees in the forest and identify them…..
This is the importance of living as I see it…… living to grow as a human being and as a member of the human race…….enjoying the journey and valuing the individual moments…….and finding/no making.... the space to do this......!
And on this diagression I leave you with one final thought……..( which I think might be important?) In our everyday lives we constantly run into situations and things we take for granted (often the simple things). These forgotten things become important to us the moment we find our self without their presence. For instance, a man holding his house keys does not often reflect upon the value of those keys. Yet the instant he misplaces his keys, they become the most important things to him at that time. In other words it is often true that we only see the importance of things when they are gone. Perhaps it all about space………when something is removed from a space, we suddenly become aware of its presence……….
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