Living simply is not as easy as it sounds for many of us because we like our attachments.  We have attachments to things, to people, to our ideas and thoughts.  It is difficult to separate from these attachments because we often use them to define who we are, what we like and dislike, and how we live. 

I can’t say that attachments have their place because I have only seen the negative impact of attachments. I describe attachment as a cloying type of dependency that is not in our best interest and does not help us reach our “best and highest good.”

Our attachments to our possessions manifest in various forms – from closets bulging with clothes and shoes, to storage facilities packed with items seldom used, or to rooms filled with magazines, papers, boxes and stuff that can stifle and overwhelm. 

Simplicity is one approach to overcoming our attachments to things, ideas and ways of living. It is the antithesis of clutter which cannot and does not serve our best and highest good.  Clutter is a form of attachment.  It can have a very subtle effect on peaceful well-being.  And it can do so without our realzing it. A cluttered interior can be depressing, overwhelming and exhausting, and the clutterer may never attribute those feelings to her environment.

The television show, “Hoarders”, gives painful insight into how attachments to things has a negative impact on peaceful well-being.  Each hoarder can justify their clutter with strong conviction and simultaneously sadly express how unhappy they are with it.  Yet, when the time comes for them to detach from their clutter, they experience real feelings of fear and sometimes rage.  They become so completely overwhelmed by the process of simplifying that some are not able to detach.

I think our approach to simpifying our lives is based largely on how sensitive we are to our environment.  A minimalist, for instance, may be far more sensitive to clutter than a professed pack-rat. The character “Monk” exhibited hypersensitivity to his environment and people like him are less-inclined to harbour clutter. Others with a different sensivity to their environment can live seemingly comfortable in those environments in spite of cobwebs, weeks of accumulated dust, boxes stacked in corners or mounds of paper on a desk.

Are minmalists less depressed that hoarders? Does having a cleaner, uncluttered environment make you happier in the world? Books have been written on the subject. Authors purport that more positive energy moves through clean, uncluttered spaces.  Feng Shui experts link clutter to stagnant energy.  The “zen” home is the unfettered home.  I personally find myself becoming careless with my living space when I am tired or sick.  When I begin to feel better, the first thing I do is to move about cleaning my space.  It seems to reinforce my improved physical state and more positive feelings.

What is becoming more evident is that as I become more comfortable in my “unfettered” space, I relate differently in my relationships to people, my community, my business and life situations.  I feel myself moving away from labels, categorizations, subjectifications and “shoulds”.  It is a freeing and often fleeting experience, the latter becoming less so.

This thread is not over . . . it continues as I ponder the subject further.

This discussion has no particular end.  It is a series of random thoughts about relationships and things.

Attachments have become a way of relating to the world.  They carry referential preferences to past emotions that tie us in a balanced or unbalanced way to ideas, to things and to circumstances.

The buddhists way is to detach and to accept the impermanence in things.  It is said, that when we do this, we eliminate suffering.  But how does that work exactly? 

When I think on personal attachments to a person I love, I hold on to the good “feelings” I have with that person and attach a preference to them in order to “extend” the “goodness” of that relationship. These good feelings, then, become the reference point for current and future interactions.  But is the feeling the attachment or is it the referential preference? Or are they one in the same?

When a negative situation arises with my friend, my reference points change somewhat, they are modified to include a certain level of appreciation for the instability of human feelings and behavior, but they also come with a certain level of detachment.  Maybe the detachment occurs because the referential preferences have been altered and the way I perceived the relationship is no longer one that I want to attach to completely.  Perhaps this is one intepretation of the dynamics of relationships. 

Food for thought . . .still thinking . . . and eating