Tapping A Latent Spirit of Revolution

It's a little embarrassing that I feel so good about it.  It simply shouldn't be this big of a deal.  Alas, but it is.

Time gets sliced up and packaged in various familiar ways -- the Renaissance Period, the Romantic Period, the Industrial Age, the Age of Enlightenment; Modernism, Post-modernism, and then anyone's guess.  The whole of my years could well be labeled "the Consumer Age."  All my life the cultural forces have been aligned behind the impulse to shop.  And I mean "all."  Local churches and TV "ministries" have taken the "if you can't beat them, join them" approach, hawking all kinds of consumer goods.  And even the government.  When hijacked airliners were flown into New York skyscrapers on September 11, 2001, the best advice our elected leaders could offer was "get back out there and shop."  Mine -- and certainly the ones who have come after -- is a generation bred and reared to do just that.  Our closets are full, our car trunks are stuffed; thankfully entrepreneurs conceived of the genius to build rental storage units -- an enterprise for which previous generations had no use.

I would like to say that I have been above all this -- that I have eaten only when hungry; that I have purchased only out of need; that my closets could be used as bedrooms for all the extra space remaining -- but that is sadly not the case.  I -- like every available storage area in my house -- am overweight.  Shelves are crowded, closets are full, drawers can hardly close.  Every now and then we reach a saturation point and load our cars for a deposit at Goodwill or the church's rummage sale; but it is like withdrawing a finger from the ocean -- it scarcely leaves a mark.

And so it was that, chilly outside, we opted yesterday afternoon to walk around the mall.  We tied on our running shoes, drove across town, and commenced our stride.  It was, to be sure, an intermittent pace.  We stopped at William Sonoma; we stopped at the Apple Store; and here; and there.  We felt the seduction...

...and walked away.  Perhaps it was the echo of Stephen Covey (of 7 Habits fame) encouraging us to put some distance between stimulus and response; perhaps it was the vivid recollection of our already crowded shelves; perhaps it was a new-found frugality that simply didn't want to spend the money.  Or perhaps -- and this is actually my hope -- we simply recognized that we needed nothing that we saw.

It's counter-cultural, I know.  But having spent my formative years in the '60's, revolution is in my bones.