Whenever I hear that advertisement on the radio, it makes me shake my head. The first few times I heard it, I really thought it was one of those corny pick-up lines! These days, we are coddled so much that we seek convenience and comfort in every conceivable way. I remember as a child, in India, we used to sleep under the stars. We were given a bed sheet, a blanket and a pillow. There were a number of charpais (beds) laid out on the terrace and you tried to grab the one nearest to the fan. That was it. And the generation today will grow up on sleep numbers! For those of you who don't know what a "sleep number" is; it relates to the softness or firmness of your mattress, on either side.
In today's world, we are used to everything good and great in life. Instant gratification is the essence of life. When we want something, we want it yesterday. And we want it with all the bells and whistles. If its a car, we want the "Limited" edition; if we want marble in the house, it has to be "Italian"; if we want a perfume, it's got to be "French". Have you recently been to the grocery store to get bread? There are twenty different kinds of bread, for God's sake. Well, now we are paying for our excesses to some extent and getting a much needed lesson about restraint. You always try to improve what you have, whether it be materialistic things or relationships. But the important thing is to be content and happy with what we have, rather than being miserable about what we don't. Yes, contentment can kill ambition. So it is important to strive hard towards what we want to have, but we should stay within the realms of reality and circumstances.
As Charles Dickens once said -- "Vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess." There is something unnerving about the words "more than enough". When we have more, it is never enough. It is always somewhere out there, just out of reach. The more we acquire, the more elusive enough becomes. An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit.
"Anything you cannot relinquish when it has outlived its usefulness possesses you, and in this materialistic age, a great many of us are possessed by our possessions." ~ Thoreau
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