Musashi's Dokkodo (The Way of Walking Alone)

Teacher:
There is something to be said for being practical. As I read it this
precept is all about being practical. For a person in Musashi’s life
and time having too many possessions, especially any unnecessary
possessions, would be a real hindrance. And for some people in our
own time, this advice will ring true.
It also follows along with Buddhist precepts too, in that when we
have possessions we seem in a very real sense to be owned by
them rather than owning them. For some people, possessions alter
their decisions and attitudes toward people or life changes. For an
example, I kept my trophies from martial arts tournaments in my
younger days well into my middle age. One was a prized possession
to me. It was from a taekwondo tournament in 1995, a National
Championships Grand Champion trophy. As I aged and my body
became less flexible and much more crumbly, that trophy became a
more and more powerful reminder of the person I was back then.
Unfortunately I held on to that trophy for too long. I remember almost
losing my temper when it was broken when being moved into the
garage. Thoughts about how my wife had always hated that trophy
because it represented a time when I was the best started rolling
through my mind. It was much like the father in the movie A
Christmas Story, when the mother breaks the lamp. I am thankful

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that rational thought took over before I started actually saying the
words that were in my head. There could have been a big problem…
There was also a strange but powerful sense of shutting a door
when I threw the trophies in the trash when we sold that house and
were leaving for the final time. I was no longer going to have to find a
place to keep my sacred objects. Never again would there be a
moment of losing my temper over things that were no longer needed.
This is just one small example of the way that our possessions start
to change our thinking. In my case it served as a reminder of past
triumph. In most cases it is merely a reminder that the past really
happened. For many people, the past seems too much of a dream to
have been real, and we need those reminders that certain things
actually occurred.
We place a higher than needed importance on the past, and often
we do so at the cost of the present. This also falls back onto the
Buddhist philosophy of “living in the now.” But we do need to
remember, regardless of our personal religious beliefs, that the now
is all that is real. It is all that we have and all that we can influence.