Being More With Less
“What is my purpose? What am I supposed to be doing, chasing, pursuing? I feel like I wasted my entire life doing things that don’t matter to me, spending my time trying to please others. I don’t feel like I belong anywhere, or with anyone.”
I sat on the curb of a gas station parking lot with a 79¢ slurpee in hand, and a good friend to my right. The time was past midnight. And the exchanges between us ignited a spark that lit up the night sky; reflecting the depths we traversed through our conversations.
For the first time in a long time, I felt sincerity again. There was no ulterior motive, no agenda, nothing in it for me but lack of sleep and lime green sugar. There was no hyper-attentiveness towards self that often consumed my consciousness.
No: “Am I being recognized, respected, admired, served, appreciated?”
Nor: “am I benefitting, gaining anything, growing rich yet?”
The absence of self kindled a flame that thawed out a frozen, hoarded potential — sourced from the haven of purity and flowing from the fountain of selflessness. These free-flowing reservoirs facilitated some kind of state of being that finally felt real and wholesome.
Forget just me, the world in its entirety seemed to benefit through our reciprocated genuineness and conceived optimism.
It may have been some kind of opening — one that transformed the inner eye — as we began to see the once overwhelming burdens of both ourselves and the world as excitingly surmountable.
وتَعْظُـــــــــــــــمُ فِي عَيْـــــــــــــــنِ الصَّغِيْـــــــــــــــرِ صِغَـــــــــــــــارُهَا
Trifle matters are magnified in the eyes of small-minded people,
وتَصْغُـــــــــــرُ فِـــــــي عَيْـــــــــــــــنِ العَظِيْـــــــــــــــمِ العَظَائِـــــــــــــــمُ
While daunting matters are subdued in the eyes of the great.
~ Al Mutanabbi
Where was I before then? What was I doing with my time? Dedicating every ounce of myself to what exactly? Money? Status? Stability? Respect? It was as though I had no existence until that spark ignited. As though everything seemed so lifeless, unattainable, lonely, and never-ending.
Before then, I camped alone in the desolate woods of myself. There, I spent my time hoarding heaps of dried leaves to keep me warm, and safe from my own void — curtained with an abandoned darkness. My hands, desperately cold, managed to spark a flame. And in an instant, a blaze of warmth overtook me, temporarily granting me comfort, and blinding me to the realities of myself. In that same instant, the entire reserve of dried leaves burnt to ashes, contriving a cyclical desire to find more.
Again and again, my self-proclaimed mission became to embark alone towards an inherently fleeting, egocentric, and limiting type of “purpose”: self-comfort.
That was all I knew.
That was all I thought there ever was.
Such is the pursuit of wealth — strictly for its own sake.
But a flame must, after all, consume something more substantial than dried paper if it is to live for more than just an instant. Engaging with firewood, sourced from living trees, is necessary. Engaging with the surrounding living world is necessary (as in the case with a good friend).
The plight of a lonely journey towards self-comfort and satisfaction, in fact, limits the accessibility one has to interact with other living entities. What remains is a stifled individual spending his entire life rummaging through leaves to find warmth, meaning, and a sad excuse for a purpose in life.
The path toward something greater — this kind of spark that simultaneously ignites meaning, purpose, and drive, while evoking sincerity — is not related to physical or monetary acquisition. Rather, it seems to have two prerequisites:
- Renouncing the fallacy that physical entities intrinsically provide value and worth
- Experiencing a genuine, unembellished, and undisturbed connection with another
However, the more things we pursue, the more distracted we can become from understanding and implementing these two prerequisites. Waning towards the physicality of the world, be it through means of wealth or an acquisition that exclusively serves the self, conveys a misconception that these are the things that give us purpose, and perhaps even are our purpose.
Our vast potentials are thus stunted, restricted, and limited to work only towards the narrow confines of the self and the physical plane.
Conversely, having as few things as possible may very well equate to experiencing as many depths as ever.
Consider the unfortunately frequent phenomenon of artists producing their best works at the beginning of their careers. Then, upon “making it” and accumulating both fame and wealth, the quality of their work objectively dwindles, as the connection or spark their day-one fans harbored disappointingly fades.
This is a strange situation. The artist’s acquisition of wealth and fame means more access to resources, equipment, tools, and so many other things at their disposal. One would think that the quality of their work increases the more their quantity increases.
But no. Far from it.
Great work is inherently holistic, necessarily deriving from greatness itself. And greatness is by nature selflessly serving. It is able to live on, beyond the death of its artist, stretching past the confines of its initial locale, reaching and impacting others in far-off lands and even across eras; remembered and revered.
Therefore, whatever thing is being used does not harbor greatness in and of itself; it simply serves as a vessel for it. In other words, the intentions and efforts of the artists themselves facilitate great work, which suggests that greatness comes from within the artist.
So why do artists make great and memorable works early in their careers as opposed to when they are more well-known?
Perhaps the fewer things we have, and the fewer materials we pursue, the more we are able to maximize any given physical tool's potential by harnessing, concentrating, and exhausting our efforts into its capacity.
When this happens, a kind of intimate relationship is established between a person and their tool, where they may cherish it to be the medium through which they express something within. It becomes a sort of extension of the body. Like a new limb that voices a hidden dimension — something greater than the five senses.
When people work for the sole purpose of serving themselves (as in, only being in it for the money), the connection others have with them and their work inevitably wanes. When something is done with selfishness, it strangely becomes unattractive, lacks quality, and quickly spirals towards entropy; “falling off”.
Needless to say, an inherently selfish drive becomes evident in a person’s work, and it is as though their intentions are actively demanding the support of the ones they are ostracizing to uplift their own self-centered pursuits. As a result, there is no room for greatness when the channels of connection are clogged with egocentricity. Why would anyone find a connection with someone who actively ostracizes them? Who cut themselves off from the rest of the world and cut the rest of the world off from themselves, only to pursue themselves and their own self-interests?
Entropy’s greatest narrative.
It would seem that physical things themselves are only a means to a greater end. They are tools after all. If we were to stop our journey at the acquisition of these tools, the work would never even begin. Instead, any benefit would be restricted to a very small area, thus limiting our efforts to only serving ourselves instead of choosing to maximize it fully by reaching others.
Plato is known to have said that beauty is the splendor of truth. Perhaps then, greatness is the splendor of beauty, and selflessness is the splendor of greatness.
Maximizing the potential of the few things within our possession gives us access to the greatness of ourselves and the things we use. If we can not achieve this with what we have been given, then how can we expect to do the most with the abundance we look to acquire in the future?
Do we need things to give us our full potential? No. That potential comes from within — from something greater. Something that can inspire greatness with only a 79¢ slurpee, and a good friend.
Be in pursuit of something greater than wealth. For:
Some people are so poor, all they have is money.