Nothing in My Pockets

I've just spent a few days at a workshop up in the mountains, living for those days in a small cabin in a small camp.  The first thing that I did when I got there was to empty my pockets--I took out my wallet, my keys, my money--everything went into a drawer in the cabin for my entire stay.  It was an incredibly liberating experience.  I felt free, unencumbered, untied.  I wasn't obligated to have anything with me like my driver's license or money, because I didn't need anything at all.

I told a colleague who was there with me just how good it felt, and she got a strange look in her eyes.  "I wish I could say that," she said.  "It made me nervous not having all that stuff with me."  It was a response that I never could have imagined hearing.  What was freeing and pleasant for me was stressful and unpleasant for someone else--even though there really was nothing inherently stressful about the situation at all.  Do we get so tied to our accouterments that we start to attach our identity to them?

I'm happy to say that by the third day, she was feeling much better about the situation, even enjoying it and feeling the freedom that I had felt.  It was a great experience to experience reality without the burdens that we somehow come to call "necessities" in our lives.

Can you put yourself in situations in which you don't need all the "stuff" that we so often think that we absolutely have to have?  It's nice sometime to spend a night or two in a hotel where you can do nothing but go for walks and return to your room, not driving anywhere or doing anything that requires the credit cards or the cell phone or the laptop.  Just be you.  Just enjoy each moment as it comes.  Don't feel stressed, and don't be nervous--those things aren't necessary to your life or to your identity at all.  You are you and you are beautiful, and perhaps without the many distractions that we carry around so much, you can start to discover just who is the marvelous creature that you are.