Good grief! Has anyone heard the news today?: Two women got into a fight over a toy in Toys R Us near Palm Springs, California. Their "men" got involved and ended up shooting each other with real guns. Neither one survived. How do these men entered a children's store with real guns? How about their surviving children, what a great way of spending their holidays, grieving the loss of their dads! What is going on with people today? Do the holidays bring the worst of us? Is it stress that makes us act irrationally? Is it the economy? The second story in the papers today, a temp employee working at a Walmart somewhere in the east coast gets ran over by a mob of people waiting for the doors to open at 5:30 AM. Poor guy, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I read that the mob managed to break the doors with the pressure of the stampede...Despite these sad news about human character I adventured to take my 15 year old daughter to the mall. She wanted to "experience" black Friday. As I followed her from store to store, I saw the faces of people, mostly with robotic expressions of pain, hurried, sadness. In contrast the holiday music was playing all over the mall. I tried to get in the "spirit" but opted for quietly praying for peace and sanity across the globe. While the materialistic side of me struggled with making sense of the newest fashions imagining myself on that outfit or this other one.
At the end I realized that my spiritual awakening journey (which started a couple of years ago) was getting in the way. I sense of detachment from my sensorial me was present. This awareness stopped me from getting too excited about clothes, shoes, etc and I did not mind. I shared these feelings with my daughter to which she responded: "You do not know what you are missing" (by then she has bought several outfits). Driving home was silent and each remained with our own thoughts. I felt a sense of wonder embracing the experience where my soul rested in the spirit and my body rested from consumerism.