Do you think too much about goats?
I’m currently living in a big house with plenty of space. Space to pile up books, space to lay down my yoga mat, space to think. I was very lucky to find the place. It’s a lovely old Japanese house, built in 1942 with many traditional features such as tatami mats and sliding paper screens. There’s even a samurai guarding the house downstairs; an old photo of an ancestor of the family who owns the house, complete with twin swords and fearless yet nonchalant gaze into the camera. I wake up from time to time as the house shakes thanks to an earthquake somewhere down the coast which can be a little disconcerting but you learn to live with it. I figure that the house somehow managed to survive the fire-bombing of Tokyo during World War II so it must be built of pretty strong stuff. I don’t even bother getting out of bed.
Next year my living arrangements are going to have to change as the lease will be up on this place and I will probably end up moving into one of the more typical apartments that you can find in Tokyo, something more akin to a small metal box. The kind of thing you keep rabbits in, in the USA, but I don’t want to talk about rabbits. I want to talk about goats. I’ve recently been enjoying a book about integrating yoga values into everyday life. It’s called Living Your Yoga: Finding the Spiritual in Everyday Life by Judith Lasater. It provides many examples of the little mind games that we play everyday, that trap us, and drain us of positive energy. Mini-challenges provide ways to break the negative patterns by experimenting with different aspects of our lives. But, I digress. I want to talk about the goats, my favorite story from the book:
A man goes to the local rabbi to complain that he can’t seem to find any peace. He lives in a small house with his wife, three children, dog, a sheep and some chickens. There’s so much noise and not enough space. He asks the rabbi for advice. “Buy a goat,” the rabbi says. “Buy a goat?” he thinks, not really understanding the advice but deciding to follow it because the rabbi is well respected in the village.
So, he buys the goat and pretty soon he’s back at the rabbi’s complaining about how there’s even more noise and chaos than before. “What should I do?” asks the villager. “Sell the goat,” replies the rabbi and the man takes the rabbi’s advice.
He returns to the rabbi’s a few days later to thank him for his wise advice as life now seems much more peaceful than before.
Two years ago a guy called Dave Bruno took a trip to the rabbi’s and decided to reduce his number of possessions down to 100 in a bid to swim against the tides of “American-style consumerism.” His set of rules and advice to “reduce, refuse and rejigger” spawned a media sensation and there are now many blogs about voluntary simplicity and minimalism. I tried the challenge, created a spreadsheet and by allowing a little flexibility in the accounting rules, came up with a list of 88 items. I couldn’t really bring myself to going down to the level of counting individual shirts, books and the like. It was all well and good but then I decided that it was all becoming a bit obsessive. Why should I care about exactly how many things I’ve got? What’s with this fascination for counting material possessions? It seemed like ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ had moved swiftly into ‘getting down with the Joneses.’ I enjoy Leo Babauta’s mnmilist blog but do I really need to know the names of all of his 43 goats?
There is a lot to be said for the process though. It’s not about the end-point but the journey of re-examining lifestyle choices, questioning consumption choices and challenging the values that underpin the inexhaustible appetite of the ‘work-produce-consume-pollute’ cycle that many of us inhabit. This is brilliantly explained by the twenty minute animation, The Story of Stuff:
What should we, as responsible, conscientious inhabitants of this large rock hurtling through space at thirty kilometers per second, actually be doing to try to change the situation? The simple answer is that we all need to be happy with less stuff. We’ve all been buying too many goats for too long. When we get bored of one goat, we get ourselves a different one. This is not sustainable and the good news is that having less creates the space to live more. The space to think, the space to enjoy the simple pleasures in life and the space to roll out the yoga mat again, no matter how small the room we live in.
