draw your material desires
One of the less healthy ways I cope with stress is with retail therapy, which seems to be a quite popular practice here. As an aspiring minimalist, I am constantly fighting the compulsion to fill the void inside me with material things, so I was amazed to discover Noa Goffer's creative solution to this issue.
There are so many good bits here. It sounds to me as though Goffer's drawing practice is her meditationâshe reflects on her material, examining at them more closely to see what they actually are before letting them go.
Finding herself at a peak point of coveting many things she couldnât afford, Noa sought to use creativity as a means of letting off some consumerist steam. This resulted in her creation of The Wishlist, a project she succinctly describes as âa personal diary or imaginary wallet, depicting my relentless desire for accumulating âstuffââ which now acts âas a soothing strategy or therapy to ease my materialistic urgesâ.
Noa found herself reflecting on her desires, looking deeper into the constant urge we have to accumulate: âItâs interesting and perhaps a little disturbing to understand how much of what we want to have is a way to define and distinguish ourselves from another,â Noa says. And soon, Noa realised that researching, choosing items, clicking âadd to cartâ, âalmost felt as gratifying as actually making the purchaseâ.
âFor me, these illustrations helped in letting go of these objects. Drawing them and then exposing them to the world made me feel like I already have them. My therapist loved it.â
Along these lines, I'm thinking of some other quotes, not from the article:
"Not wanting something is as good as having it."
"Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for."
"He who is not satisfied with a little is satisfied with nothing."