The Pleasures of Renunciation
There have been times when I have been so obsessed by materialism that I felt sure it was an addiction. My brain tends toward obsessions and churn--maybe some vestiges of the bipolar disorder that snakes its way through my family line--and the culture of late, pan- and hyper-mediated capitalism is tailor-made for that. Plus: being a woman. There is always a target on my back.
First, the object enters into view. It is on a television show, the pages of a magazine, worn by a friend. It can be in an ad that is in the periphery of vision on Facebook, it can stem from a memory with a strong emotion attached. It worms its way into my brain and attaches to some neural pathway and wiggles there, waiting to be soothed. I had a dream once that I was in Southern California, glowing like Gwyneth Paltrow, wearing linen pants, sitting on the floor, sipping coffee and reading, totally at ease, a perfect beam of late morning sunlight highlighting the table in front of me. At various times over the years I have found myself seeking out the just-right pants, rug, table, mug that would echo that dream. The appearance of the object in the field of desire is delicious.
And then, zeroing in on that object, and the promise it holds, the promise of it being the object to end all objects, the promise of it being the last object one will ever crave or need, and the satisfaction and relief having it will finally bring;
The glory of the hunt. The hunt for the perfect object to fulfill that desire, a hunt beautifully prone to disembodiment and dissociation, offering a single-mindedness that drowns out all other needs, feelings, desires;
The ritual of the purchase itself--the entering in of the credit card number, the deliciousness of waiting for the package, following tracking numbers, the shame and guilt of seeing the packages pile up on the front porch, the absurd and ineffective hiding of the packaging, the apologizing and explaining away, the careful filing away among the other objects, and then--most perverse of all--the refusal to use the object because of its carefully-wrought preciousness;
Or, using it, and getting the best rewards of all--the second look from a woman on the street, appraising the object, creating her own mental catalogue of desire; the compliment from a friend; the feeling of consolidation that comes from having-it-all-together, being prepared, not being caught unawares or out of line;
Then, the great swing: feeling totally overwhelmed by objects, ashamed by the inability to control one's impulses. The drawer that won't close, the crowded hangers, the tchotchkes tumbling off the shelves. Enter "minimalism," enter purging. l ritualistically test objects for whether they bring "joy," plan a capsule wardrobe, by new objects that say "simple" on them, believing that things "no longer serve me" and should be eliminated. Getting on top of it, setting new goals.
The obsession that fuels decluttering is satisfying and addictive in the same way that going on a diet is addictive; the allure of self-control, renewal, erasure of impulse and desire, the fresh start.
Purification.
But as spaces open up, they mirror the biggest space of all, beg to be filled, and then the cycle begins again.
***
We moved my parents out of their very large house this summer. They are not so old, but they are unfortunately very disabled, and the house had stairs, and was proving difficult to clean and maintain. After years of burrowing and nesting and refusing to downsize, they listed the house, it sold over night, and my brother and I and our spouses had only a few weeks to get them settled into a smaller house.
I don't know how to communicate what this process was like, really--the divesting of lifetimes worth of things. Antiques and valuables were everywhere you turned. Every bed had boxes underneath it; every closet packed to the depths; every box had boxes within. We tried having a garage sale for them last summer, and both my brother and I nearly cried in frustration at the obstinacy of over-pricing, the refusal to let things go. Things stayed in the house, immovable, preserved as if in resin, while my parents' health deteriorated and the sphere of their physical existence grew ever smaller, confined to bathroom-bedroom-recliner-tv.
And so there was no gentle, reasonably-paced sloughing of objects that led up to the move, which ideally would have taken place over many years. Instead, it was hurried, rough, violent. Dozens of bags of trash (formerly carefully preserved in accounting boxes, albums, notebooks) were carried out of the house, almost at a run, then taken to the dump, my eighty-year-old step-father pulling things out of the truck with a hoe onto the trash heap, but not before rescuing "treasures" that one of us had carelessly thrown out. "You can't throw away these pictures," he would scold. "These are some of my favorite pictures on earth."
Him sitting in a chair while we brought objects before him for judgment; him barking "KEEP!" or "SAINT VINCENT DE PAUL!" as a means of sorting what would go to the new house and what would be donated. Truckloads taken to that thrift store. Truckloads taken to our own houses, where we swapped out their nicer things for our poorer ones. I still wake up in my own home and look around, wondering when a grown-up moved in. Yard sale-ing and Craig's Listing our own castoffs, the never-ending management and rotation of stuff.
Helping my mom clean out her closet the night before the moving trucks came, I got rid of almost every piece of clothing that had hung in the gigantic walk-in closet. Years of clothing, in every size from 4 to 20. She could not get out of bed for this, kept turning over on her side and staring at the wall. "I can't wear any of that anymore. I'm too fat." Her misery and despair is deep, dulled by years of opiate dependency, but delivered with so little affect it is hard to know how to respond. And there is no time for comfort anyway. The trucks are coming.
One box I bring out does evoke a response: "Oh! That is the most important box in the world to me!"
I pry off the lid so she can look inside. "That's every nice card you, your dad, or your brother ever wrote me," she says.
We have taken no less than a dozen full-size trash bags to the dump filled with every greeting card my mom ever received, maybe since her birth in 1950.
"Well," I say. "Let's pack this up and you can go through it at the new house."
"No," she says, turning back toward the wall. "Throw it away."
Even after all of that, even after the donation or integration of thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of objects--our inheritance, our shame--four moving trucks filled with stuff still departed for the new house. The three-car garage at the new house is filled so full one can hardly walk through it. Objects litter the side of the house, the lawn, the back patio. And my parents are too exhausted to unpack themselves, so now we carve out hours from our exhausted weeknights, our too-full weekends, to go and make sure their beds are set up, their coffeemaker is unpacked, they have trash cans in their bathrooms. Boxes are still everywhere.
Even so, my step-dad still goes out every day to buy new things--sheets, a desk, a television stand. Because: they don't know where the old things are, and couldn't physically move them in if they did. Because: they can buy things--it's easier. Because: that is how we do.
So the race is on to get them unpacked and settled as fast as we can, in what is probably a fruitless effort to keep them from re-accumulating again. We all know the next move--probably to Assisted Living--is right around the corner. And they won't be taking many treasures with them there.
***
Obsessive acquisition, like so many other addictions, is so perfectly suited to the manic brain, and our culture is only too happy to oblige.
But maybe there is a corrective, a practice that is not about deprivation, or purification, or moralizing and shame. As with diet culture, deprivation is destined to fail. When I tell myself I can't have certain foods, that certain foods are bad, that I am bad when I eat them, when I embark on yet another diet, I really am continuing the obsessive cycle of promise-restriction-failure-binge-shame. It is the cycle itself that is addictive, and until I become conscious of the cycle, and disrupt it in some way, it will only keep repeating itself.
The same is true for materialism. My fascination with accumulation is completely bound up in my fascination with minimalism; it is a dialogic relationship, a spiral of indulgence and punishment. Please know: I see what this is. This is a problem of extreme material privilege. This is a problem of narcissism and and an obsession with self-improvement. There is a small-minded and insular self-referencing where I can indulge the time and resources to finding the one thing that will finally fix me and free me from my longing and shame. I see these things, and have also been powerless to address them. Or thought I was. Which bring me to this possibility, the possibility of a way out:
I am wondering if the corrective is renunciation.
I'm no religious scholar, and am very new to Buddhism. I'm also aware of the tendency toward Orientalism, particularly among women of a certain race and age (mine; see reference to Gwyneth Paltrow dream above), so I offer this up gingerly and with great humility as a tender, unformed, naive idea, that risks both essentialism and colonization. I proceed anyway, because, incredibly, I get glimpses of the practice of renunciation actually working in the face of my accumulation addiction. In any case, this is not about prescription, but reflection.
To add one more caveat: I'm not interested in ideological purity here. In fact, that's what I'm trying to get away from, because purification is part of the consumer treadmill cycle that has me trapped. Forgive me. I stumble forward, clumsy, fumbling.
What I mean when I'm thinking about and practicing renunciation has primarily to do with the very specific practices of 1) noticing (or what Buddhists might call awareness or consciousness) and 2) pausing.
I had a therapy appointment a few weeks ago, and as I walked up to the historic building where my therapist has her office, I encountered her out on the strip of grass near the street, hands behind her back, gazing at an absurdly prolific grape vine in the next yard over.
She laughed and said she was just noticing how glorious the vine was, and then how immediately her brain went to wondering how she might grow one in her own yard. In other words, she immediately jumped from appreciation to attachment. The moment of appreciation, so pleasant and lovely, begs to be made permanent. We think through ownership we can defeat impermanence. Owning is our most accessible form of attachment.
The material impacts of this on our magnificent planet are immense. The spiritual impacts on us, immense too.
How this works when you are trapped in accumulation mode is: you see the plant, experience its pleasant effects (its scent, the promise of sweet grapes on demand, its visual lusciousness), you drive to Home Depot, spend money on a plant, plant it, and then (if you are me) promptly forget to take care of it, it dies, and then you must go buy more plants. Or by then you are on to some new obsession.
How this works if you are aware of renunciation: you see the plant, experience its pleasant effects (its scent, the promise of sweet grapes on demand, its visual lusciousness); you notice that this is a pleasant experience, rather than an unpleasant one; you observe your desire to go to Home Depot and recreate this experience for yourself so that you will never have to be without it, so that pleasantness will last forever; rather than go to Home Depot, you pause, maybe for some breaths, or to put your hand on your heart, or to further feel the feelings of sadness that arise out of the fact that this grape plant is not owned by you and is not permanent in any case; you comfort yourself, or extend compassion to yourself, for experiencing such a basic human desire, or the sadness of renunciation.
That is a lot of rich experience you're having there, in the course of being present with that plant, and your own desires, and your own feelings around renunciating those desires for permanence. That looks a lot like having a very embodied, meaningful human experience.
After that session, my therapist sent me this haiku:
In Kyoto,
hearing the cuckoo,
I long for Kyoto.
***
This story has a predictable ending:
I still want to buy things. Writing this right now I'm thinking about how I'd like some new short-sleeve t-shirts, and how I'd probably need to get rid of some things in my closet to make room for them, but some of my clothes are surely getting worn out by now. And....
Like that, I'm off to the races.
But, awareness. I see that desiring part of myself, the self who feels frazzled after a long week where she maybe didn't speak up for herself so well and worked a little too much and just wants to be at peace, and thinks a few t-shirts are just the ticket.
And then today, instead of going to that very cute boutique downtown, I'll choose to spend some time on the meditation cushion, because I know that time on the cushion is what allows me to observe and pause. Observing and pausing is the only thing that feels real in the face of my overwhelming desires to step back on the treadmill and dissolve, dissociate. I will resist sitting on the cushion rather than doing all the other things that call to me, and still I'll choose to sit, because renunciation is the one thing that feels like freedom.
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