Day 10 in The Beat Handbook is titled, "On Freedom and Materialism." It references the above passage from The Dharma Bums.
As Chuck Palahniuk points out in Fight Club, you are not your job, your car, your clothes, and so on. Possessions are not the secret to enjoying life, as this truck driver learns after talking with hitchhiker Ray (Jack).
One piece of advice from my book continues to resonate (even though I am far from this state of affairs right now): Be able to fit everything you own into a rucksack. Then you are ready to "go go go" at a moment's notice.
Even if you can't do that in actuality, can you do it emotionally? That is, are you attached to your "stuff," or could you walk away from any and all of it at a moment's notice without suffering?
Or if there was a fire in your house is there anything other than your family and your cats that you'd feel a need to grab on the way out?
ReplyDeleteGreat question.
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