You are strongest when you are OK with the least.
Look, we all want things, I get it. Things are nice. Things give us comfort, and protect us. Some things even bring us joy, for a little while. But then the effect wears off, what is new is old again, and we go off searching for more more more ...
It's your own personal power - along with your relationships with others - that matters most ... having less can still provide you with everything you need.
So our addiction to "thingness" - while enjoyable - also distracts us from ourselves. After a while we think that we are the sum total of our things, not the person who owns them.
One of the costs of our addiction to things is fear. Whatever we can hold in our hand, can also be snatched from our hand. Like that first bite of the apple in the Garden of Eden, our first ownership of an object changes us. Fear of loss is suddenly introduced. We forget that there was once a time, very long ago, when we were little children, happy to toddle to and fro, exploring this and that, happy to see all the strange new things of the world around us ... without having to own them.
Now I know this is a cliche, but a good analogy might be how Native peoples regarded the land beneath their feet versus how arriving Europeans viewed that very same land. Native peoples, generally speaking, regarded the Earth as their mother, supporting and sustaining them - the idea that they might own that land was ludicrous. But having this non-ownership relationship with the land, they respected it, they honored it. And in this relationship they actually felt more secure than the greedy colonists who tried to possess it, protect it from others, and pillage everything that they saw.
So, strangely, by relinquishing the idea that you need to own anything, you actually live in greater cooperation with the environment around you. And, just as strangely, having less makes you strong. You realize that you can live with the least when you understand interdependence. Independence, on the other hand, makes you believe that you must own everything you see, otherwise you will have nothing and everyone else will have everything. Independence, counter to how we traditionally think of it, is fear-based ... while a good non-owning interdependence with your surroundings is actually based on love and trust. And it takes strength to trust - trust is not weakness.
So you can have all the things in the world and always be afraid that others are coming to take your things away from you ...
Or - yes, this is counter-intuitive - you can have less and actually feel stronger, because you will know that you have all you need so long as you're open to giving and receiving with others. You will have a deep understanding in your bones that it's your own personal power - along with your relationships with others - that matters most, that having less can still provide you with everything you need.
OK, good enough for now,
~ Quest Barely, all!
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Kemson Cooper is the creator of QuestBarely.com, a site about using the body as a path to explore the Self. He is also the author / artist of "Love Yourself ~ A Body of Work" (perhaps the world's first naked self-empowerment book)