Austerity and me....

I was halfway through a post about the evils of television and how extensive television watching leads to complete and utter thoughtlessness and how far television is from reality when the idiots who invented automatic Windows updates came up with their latest offering that shuts down your computer for you wether you want it or not.
So until that thought and the words return I am going to hop onto another train of thought.
When it comes to my living arrangements most of the time I tend to be austere.This I have noticed is most prevelant in the use of my living space.When I was young my family lived in small houses in places like KMA,Buru and Golfcourse.Later on when we moved to a larger house we had some relatives living with us and we were three to a room.Later on when my father passed away we moved to a house with the same amount of rooms but less area per square foot.The room that I was given was the sq that also doubled up as a store.My bed had been dismantled and re-assembling it would have been like doing a 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle of a grassy field without the picture.As a result I made due with the floor, I think that was the beginning of my long running affair with sleeping on the ground and futons.So alongside that mattress was a bookshelves and several boxes of the junk we tend to accumulate and never use as a family; but that ends up weighing several tonnes.
Luckily at this same time I went to university.I shared a room for two that had a partition in the middle.I will not say that my room was the defintion of order, au contraire it was chaotic,but organised chaos.But what to expect of a young man living on his own out of home.But now that I look back I noticed that over time the little nic nacs we have made few cameos in my room.I did not own nor did I ever want a lampshade,the posters reduced over time,my desk had no table cloth,no rug on the floor,one hulking sound system on the shelf and my thread bare wardrobe.
At this point in time I was very disillusioned with organised religion eg christianity (I still am) and began practicing meditation and studying eastern religions.So I guess to some extent it was made evident in me not attaching much value to material things.But don't get me wrong I still did the usual things that people do when they are in university like get wasted every other day and skip class.
When we moved to another house where I was given the sq and due to my absence it was also made home for several cases of clothing,a bookshelf and boxes which I never got a chance to go through.
So the more cramped my room got in one area the more decongested it got in another area.But I have also found the traditional Kenyan sitting room so suffocating.You have to have the wall unit that takes around a quarter of the space in the room and is packed full of cutlery that is hardly used add to that the TV,video,dvd player,sound system,family pictures,in some cases a liqour cabinet and space allowing a set of encyclopedia,a bible and some reference book of sorts (ours had all the above plus two sets of encyclopedias).Add to this there is usually a 3-4 piece furniture set but believe it or not I have been to a house that had 2 four piece furniture sets in it, you could have had a seminar in that sitting room.Dont forget the pictures all over the wall ranging from the family photos taken at Ramogi or those of kittens with some sort of pithiful saying emblazoned across them.Then comes the different varieties of covers festooning the chairs ranging from plastic that has never been taken off so every movement that you make results in a squeek and the release of noxious odours isn't absorbed but merely deflected into the air to the crocheted covers that are done in colors that clash so intensely that I swear some glow in the dark and when a window is opened at night have been responsible for several plane crashes in the vicinity of Wilson Airport as the hapless pilots have mistaken them for landing lights.Then there is the myriad selection of carpets to those that are genuinely turkish to those which came to Nairobi on a bus next to a box of Turkeys.One thing that remains the same is that in most cases is that you will have to take off your shoes, a source of embarassment for may who would recycle socks so much that those socks would have a sole that you could use to walk on the streets and shoes that emitted gases that were in the methane and ammonia family tree.Then of course came the latest accesory, the chandaliers.Some of these were tasteful in appearance but some of them had so many glass pieces that they acted as ad-hoc prisms not forgetting some were so heavy that after a few months they would bring the bulb fixture crashing down.Get's me to thinking about the "he who dies with the most toys wins" mentality we had when it came to furnishing our homes then.
So I guess somehow I have ended up doing the whole 180 degrees.Of course I still love toys for boys and those I do have especially the sacred 3; TV,DVD player and sound system.
But when it comes to my room I have no bed, I sleep on an elevated air bed instead,one chair,the sacred three (see above), a pile of my school books,novels and magazines (for me a home is not a home without printed material) and nothing on my walls.With time I do intend to get a desk but let's work slowly shall we?Yes usually moving for me is a breeze and so is cleaning too.Plus I pretty much know where everything.
So people let go of all the material things that you have that are cluttering your house physically and karmicly let's go monastic..............