Last year, on one of my parent’s visits to Poland, my mother was sitting in my apartment and we were talking about my ‘minimalist’ lifestyle. One thing she said had a big impact on me. She said ‘You’ve always had a problem with responsibility’. She was referring in that moment to the relatively few possessions I own and I’m not sure precisely what she meant but at the time I heard it as criticism. Looking back I can now agree with her and see this not as a criticism but as containing some deep wisdom.
I believe she was expressing an opinion that I choose not to ‘take responsibility’ for things and for people. I guess she believes this is something important in life and that somehow I’m trangressing some unwritten rules.
Minimalist lifestyle
I do, of course, own some things. I aim to be very conscious about what needs I’m meeting when I make decisions about buying something. Frankly if I look at most of the things available to buy I find very few needs that can be met. Or I find more interesting ways of meeting those needs. Now I rent a one room apartment and my main possessions are my laptop, iPod, mobile phone and camera. These go with me everywhere. I have some clothes, books, a little kitchen equipment, luggage, bedding and a few pieces of office equipment. That’s all. I use everything I own frequently – often to the point of wearing it out. If I don’t have clarity about a need that will be served by owning something then I don’t buy it. If I make a mistake (it happens!) and buy something I don’t use then I give it away or throw it out.
I wasn’t always like this. I remember, for example, many years ago when video cameras became widely affordable … still quite expensive but definitely within my resources. I wanted one. It was not because I wanted to make films, not because I had any particular project or use in mind … I wanted to have one. It was an uncontrollable urge, like an itch that just had to be scratched. I felt lacking in something but if you asked me what I was missing in my life I would only have been to tell you ‘a video camera’. So I bought one and it went everywhere with me for a while, in it’s nice shoulder bag. I was extremely careful with it, very proud of it and nervously kept my eye on it all the time. I used it about twice. I didn’t want it to meet any obvious need but was driven by an unconscious impulse, almost an addiction, to owning it.
I’m not advocating this lifestyle for everyone. Not at all. All I’m saying is that it works for me. I’m encouraging you to raise your level of consciousness to consider the needs behind all the things you possess. I’ve come to believe, in fact, that the more attachments I have around me, the less responsibility I have.
So … do I have a problem with responsibility?
I don’t think so. Not in terms of the way I choose to live my life on the material level, anyway. I would even go so far as to say that I take two aspects of responsibility very seriously
1 = Response-ability
Meaning my capacity to respond appropriately. The dictionary definition talks about accountability and I guess that works as well – provided it’s not mixed up with concepts of blame and shame. If I believed all the messages I’m bombarded with from the consumer culture then I’d get the idea that the more I possess the more I can do. In other words, the greater my external resources, the better able I am to respond. There’s a huge global industry aimed at convincing me of just that. When I look at any advertisement, I see the wonderful range of potential available to me by owning a particular product. For example, I saw an advert for a car the other day that implied that with this car I could drive across raging rivers, up alpine mountains and attract a beautiful woman (I guess it was aimed mainly at men).
Having a lot of stuff surely would give me more resource but I personally find the more I have, the more I invest in keeping it safe, the more my life is cluttered and the less space I have. This fear of loss that I attract to myself doesn’t sit well with me. Personally I prefer to create space in my external world and build my inner resources – this gives me my ability to respond. By not being attached to places or things then I have more freedom, more movement – I can travel light (both literally and metaphorically).
2 = duty to fulfil obligations
Here I might agree with my mother. I don’t want to do anything out of an energy of ‘duty’ or ‘obligation’ but rather out of an energy of making a difference, out of free choice and because I want to. The best way I’ve found of living this way is to be clear what needs or values I’m fulfilling by doing something. For example, I don’t want to spend time with my mother out of a motivation to be a ‘dutiful son’ or some other sense of ‘have to’. Life’s too short. I want to spend time with my mother because I enjoy being with her, because it meets my needs for care and for love. I’m sure that’s much more satisfying for both of us.
I try to apply this to everything I do because I’ve noticed that when I act out of duty or because I have a ‘responsibility’ then I don’t enjoy it – and that’s contagious. It’s not always easy … but then being response-able is not always easy.
