Questioning Assumptions Leads to Questioning Assumptions
And that’s a good thing.
I was talking to my sister the other day. She was getting ready to go to Des Moines for a five-day conference.
“And I’m only bringing carry-on!”
“After that trip to Paris with you, it’s the only way to travel,” she said.
This made me happy because I was a bit of a bully about the carry-on only rule for that trip.
It can be a bit daunting the first time you try it. But not spending an hour or more waiting for your luggage to come down the chute is life-changing.
We both agreed that we had learned some valuable lessons from the experience, and changed our outlook.
On an earlier trip to France, I hadn’t brought a bathrobe, because those things are huge and take up way too much space in a suitcase. I decided that my cardigan would make a decent cover-up should I need one.
When I got home, I eye-balled the bathrobe hanging on the back of the bedroom door and thought, “Why do I still have this?”
If my cardigan was good enough for a trip to France, surely it was good enough for hanging around the house. I donated my bathrobe and haven’t owned one since.
The list of things I don’t own that ‘everybody needs’ is long and well-considered.
I don’t own a microwave. Or a television. We gave up having a dryer fifteen years ago. I don’t own a slip. Or eye shadow. We don’t have a sofa.
At first, it can feel weird not owning all the things.
Buying them is considered a mark of adulthood. So maybe, we think, there’s something wrong with me if I don’t have them?
If we can learn to live with that feeling of weirdness, of being outside the norm, if we can realize that we don’t need to own all the things, we can also learn to stop doing all the things.
And start to live a life that serves us, rather than merely reflecting the lives and assumptions of the people around us.
“Do I need this?” is a powerful question.
I asked it of my bathrobe, of my slips. I asked it of the dryer and the couch. Bit by bit, I questioned my need for all the things.
Sorting through and being concerned about our stuff may seem shallow. Our accumulation of goods may seem trivial compared to the big issues in the world.
But I see stuff as a training ground.
It’s accessible, tactile. You hold it up, make a decision, ask of it “Do I need you?” and if the answer is no, you physically release it or, as in the case of the microwave in our house, you don’t acquire it in the first place.
This is harder to do with ideas, habits, prejudices. But the process is similar.
Pay attention to that feeling of ugh you experience when you decide that a thing is of no use to you. Learn to know what that is because that feeling will be there with the thoughts in your head.
The unquestioned assumptions, prejudices and judgments that were handed down from parents and teachers. The explanations of how the world works that you came up with when you were younger and didn’t know what you know now.
They’re all in there, waiting for you to stumble across them again and decide if they serve you.
And if you’ve practiced with physical things, and paid close attention to how it feels when you do that, you can use the same process with the immaterial.
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