Enough

I could have gone for work. But I didn’t. I have a very bad cold that also caused a significant loss of my voice, the main tool for my work. It was bad yesterday. But today it is a little better. Yet I thought I should stay back. This is my new way of saying “enough is enough” for unconstrained money making. Desire for limitless money is crazy leading, often, only to an “un-ordered chaotic life”. This want for more space, more money, and more fame is a sickening sickness, difficult to cure but very infectious, fast spreading, while no one cares about arresting it.

My everyday angels yesterday were Sina and Leanne. Sina, around noon, told me yesterday I should go home. Sina was also dragging me to come to lunch with the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) crowd. Leanne, my supervisor, later said I should take leave today. Karry, too, was very affectionate and brought me her unused lunch to take for my supper! These young people from the CBSA wanted to give me more life, more love.

Gitanjali, my only daughter, too gave me a large chunk of life and love with her timely note on “Sorry”. She had difficulty in accepting that giving less love to me. That is the struggle that I saw in her letter. She is a wonderful daughter who wants to give me nothing less than “more love and much care”. I am grateful to that invisible Manager of this oikumene for sending these angels on the path of my everyday life. It is these angels that do not let me slip into sickness and to that greater disease of “meaninglessness”.

Two media write-ups that caught my attention during the last few days are those that inspire me for greater meaning through less craze for money and space. The first one was on “Minimalist living popularized by books, websites – Grassroots movement preaches living mindfully”. This appeared in The Vancouver Sun (April 5, 2011, page B11). This piece critiques “consumerism” by promoting “minimalism” as a concept and practice. Jay Baydala from Alberta’s booming Calgary, here, becomes a model for “purging excess stuff from your life and your home”. Jay Baydala is not a fool to think that all people are going to consider him the “coolest person” in Calgary or elsewhere. That in any case is not part of his purpose or focus on “simple living”! But he is aware that his tribe is on the increase in the North American surface.

The second one is actually what I read a few minutes ago (in the morning of April 8, 2011) as I switched on my computer. It was a Yahoo report: “Woman lives large in what may be New York’s smallest apartment” (http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/good-news/woman-lives-large-may-york-smallest-apartment-20110407-115353-491.html). It is about Felice Cohen, a professional organizer -- I am not surprised a consumerist reacting to “minimalism” calls Cohen a “professional idiot” -- who lives in a small space in the large New York City. Mine, I realize, doesn’t have to be a 90 square foot house like Cohen’s. Yet I can stop in my heart that craving to increase my stature by increasing my space, or wanting that upgrading of my car.

My desire for, and thoughts on simpler living, did not suddenly fall from the sky on my lips or finger tips. I have been learning much of this stuff for a long time -- for almost forty years -- from others as well as my own experiences I often churn into poems. My poems “blocking with pride”, “lust for space kills”, “dance but touch not” and many other in my mongoose in chicken house & other poems (2010) and elsewhere, then, are my creedal affirmation on promoting a life beyond “affluence” that will not, I know for sure, influence the average crazy Joe chasing the “wind”, that nothingness.

Nonetheless, today I hum, in my heart, that poem titled, “simple pleasures”, I wrote almost two years ago. It reads:

“a strong cup of coffee

that plain black

with nothing added into it

a shorter story

to explore the collapse

of my strong youthful dreams

and a simple seat

to consume the free providence

of the strong morning sun

these are what I seek

these days in the dusk

of my crumbling life

that missed

those many birds in hand

with its focus on one in bush”

[http://isaachenryvictor.blogspot.com/]