Need vs Want

Other than to buy groceries or the necessities of life, like toilet paper and printer ink, I don't go into many stores in January.  Part of it has to do with being turned off by the total excess of the holiday season.  The other part is that there are no malls where I live and it's an hour drive to the closest one. Sometimes that's a good thing.  Like now.  Really cuts down on the shopping for the sake of shopping. You know, the shopping that you do to give yourself that little dopamine lift.  You don't need the kick-ass little red shoes, but it feels so damn good buying them.

But I've been faced with my first "do I need this or do I want this?" decision of my new year's resolution.  Bird seed.  The big bags.  For the outside birds, as I call them.  I have to differentiate as I have inside birds too.  I love birds.  I love to watch birds.  I have been known to sit on my deck for hours on a beautiful summer evening with a glass of wine, doing nothing more than watching the birds at the feeders.  To date I've identified some thirty to forty species in my yard alone.

So it begs the question:  Do I need to buy seeds to feed the birds or do I want to buy seeds to feed the birds?  And sometimes it's not a simple matter of need vs want.  Sometimes the line between the two blurs.  But when faced with this sort of blurry decision I turn to my favourite piece of poetry, written in the 12th century by Persian poet Moslih Eddin Saadi...

                                     If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft

                                     And from thy slender store two loaves alone to thee are left

                                     Sell one, and with the dole

                                     Buy hyacinths to feed they soul.

Bottom line -- feeding the birds is something I do for my soul.  And I need that.  In the long run, the feeling I get watching the birds lasts way longer than the little red shoes.

On another note...I first heard this piece of poetry on an episode of The Mod Squad.  That iconic early 70's show of which I was a faithful viewer.  Of course I only remembered a small snippet at the time, but I was so enamoured of it that I went to my local library to try to look it up.  Now given that this was pre-internet days, I consider it quite a feat that I managed to find it using reference books. But it has stayed with me ever since.  Hmm...maybe watching The Mod Squad wasn't a total waste of time after all.