when I was young, I wanted so much…
I wanted to be rich and famous and have all sorts of
sensory experiences…sex, drugs and rock and roll and
moonlight walks and every sensory experience under the sun…
as I have gotten older, I changed…
my mom who is 82, has for the last couple of years, begun to
get rid of her stuff… she has uncluttered… she stays home and
reads… that is what she does… I couldn’t understand why she
has so simplified her life… and now, now I do understand…
as you get older, you begin to realize that material possessions
don’t matter… they are just stuff cluttering your house…
as for sensory experiences, they matter less and less as I have gotten older…
I enjoy travel, but as I’ve gotten older, it has become more of a hassle then
it is worth…I truly enjoy going to Europe but the work involved, makes it
less fun then it might have been…
if material goods and sensory experiences have become less important,
what has become important? and why?
on my days off, I usually just stay home and read or study or
write…but I also have realized that my family has become much
more important then material objects or sensory experiences…
as you get older, the unimportant stuff just drops away and
and the important stuff becomes far more valuable…
I don’t rush around any more and need a really good reason to even leave the
house these days…they aren’t important…
if my house burned down, the only thing I would miss are my books,
all 5000 of them… and even a lot of those can go away…
maybe 2000 books of mine are really worth the trouble…
I could live in another house and rebuild my library…
but I need my family…it is the relationships that makes
it all worth while…
not work or material goods or money but family relationships that
become most important…
sure, sometimes they are irritating as hell, but that is how you know
they are important, they still irritate you…the other stuff doesn’t irritate
because they have become unimportant and not worth the effort…
you want to know what is important?
see how you react to it…if it provokes strong emotions,
it is still important… even politics, which as you all know are important
to me, have become less and less important to me… I don’t have the
truly strong reactions to politics that I used to… soon, even politics
will become unimportant to me…and I am ok with that…
as I grow older, I become calmer and more relaxed and more secure…
as the external world become less important, the internal world becomes
more important…as I grow older, I discover the only thing I need, was
to learn who I was and be comfortable with that…the rest is unimportant…
Kropotkin