Clutter – the bane of modern existence

After many, many years I decided to have 3 bedrooms painted in our house, where we have lived for 32 years.  Three very small bedrooms, but little did I know how much clutter even 3 little rooms can hold!  Modern life offers us so much choice, so many “things”, so much variety, which borders on infinity itself.  In our case, having four grown children, the clutter included everything from infancy through wedding mementos, sports memories, school memories, family memories and clothing, shoes and bags of all kinds. How sinful I thought that we get to have so much while others have nothing. And we get to have so much that it becomes a difficulty – something that others yearn for becomes the bane of our existence.  What to throw, what to keep, what to give away, when to give away.  Sitting in Barnes and Noble the other day, I was reading a book on “happiness”, and the woman who wrote it was sharing how parting with things actually gave her happiness – Imagine!  That’s the point I have reached.  If I can give something away to anyone – gone are the days waiting for some Muslim cause to come to my door as US has closed more and more doors of Muslim charities – anyone, even veterans of wars that kill human beings and especially Muslims-  I am happy because it helps someone.

What I also realized is that physical clutter creates mental clutter.  One is always wondering where something is and it can never be found when one needs it. That creates arguments and blame culture in the house.  Who was supposed to store it so that it could be found when whoever needed it.  What a painful challenge our consumer society has created for itself and for our poor planet.  I wonder if the weight of all the things we manufacture may one day crash the Earth’s surface with sheer enormity of the weight!  Every day new gadgets are invented, but we cannot get rid of the old versions fast enough.  Do we truly realize that the speed of progress is actually not a “good” thing anymore? Our passion for the “new” is burdening our being in many ways.  What is worse is that that progress is limited to the developed societies, and the developing societies are yearning to copy this sad trajectory!  What about the impoverished countries, well they get to have the craps perhaps.  Maybe they should get all the older TV sets, while we get the latest HD technology.  But maybe this is always how it has been – the intertwined struggle of the material and the being – constantly struggling to integrate and balance.  Right now, I am overwhelmed and acknowledge my own complicity and guilt in this process.

The most famous Indian poet – Mirza Ghalib – a Muslim, wrote Urdu poetry that defined nuance and wit itself.  I can listen to his poetry over and over again, because it intrigues the mind, seduces the heart and touches one’s being. One of his verses says that “the difficulties of my existence were so many that they became easy”.  If I were to butcher his verse and reverse it to speak to the clutter problem, I could say “the number of things to make my life easy were so many, that they became difficult”.