Pause for Thought
The Richard Allinson Show
BBC Radio 2 
Sunday, June 17th, 2012

It’s a religious platitude that we bring nothing into this world and carry nothing with us out of it at the end.  As anyone knows, however, who has moved house we seem to do our level best to compensate for this state of affairs by accumulating an incredible weight of stuff during the middle bits between our arrival and our departure.

Where does it come from?

There are presents given to us by people who obviously don’t know us very well:  Books we have no interest in or executive toys which we are too busy to play with. 

Then there are the outdated things.  Our interests were different, once upon a time, and we collect things associated with a particular hobby and pursuit.  And then we moved on and lost interest but all the trinkets, the tools are still there in a box marked “Miscellaneous – Very”.  Outdated too are the  ill fitting clothes which we once looked good in before the outward development of the belly out front and the backside out back.   We’d be embarrassed to try and shoehorn our way into these old clothes. 

In both cases these things no longer match our shape or our interests.   They are no longer part of who we have become.

Moving house – like many forms of spiritual discipline – is a stripping back of the illusion of who we – or other people – thought we were.  We simply get rid of what is not us.  In packing up a box to take down to the charity shop we get closer to accepting and even rejoicing in the truth of who we have genuinely become.