Designer Jeans

Imagine: You feel life slipping away with each breath. You feel the weight of your heart growing heavier with each beat. During this realization comes your final thoughts and words. You look around for familiar faces, a husband, a wife, a sister, or a brother, a child, even a friend and you ask...you ask about your collection of...of designer jeans...What? I know, that's totally out of place. Who, in their right mind, would be thinking about clothes, shoes, cars,--you know all the stuff we place so much importance on during our lives-- in their final moments?


What's interesting to me, and I know many have made the point previously, is that clarity seems to come when we see the end of things, coming near. Life is very much like a good book; we enjoy it, yet dread the finality of that ending punctuation. Knowing that the final period is coming, we take stock of everything we've experienced up to that point. We gloss over the trivial, and highlight the major moments. We look back at our failures, and own our victories, and quite possibly we may still harbor feelings that we could have done more. So what does any of this have to do with the title Designer Jeans? Everything.

We continue to find (or have heaped upon us) ways to stratify ourselves. From where we live, to what we drive, to what we wear, these are all used to assign a value to the owner. And, because we are willing participants in this determination of value we, in turn, devalue the true measure of a life's worth. Go through any "impoverished" area of any major U.S. city and you will find, young and old, walking about,wearing shoes-clothes--and jewelry--  that might suggest they are visitors from some far off affluent suburb. This is not the case. This is the effect of the culture of devaluation. No one wants to be poor. Everyone wants to be rich, and the surest way for a poor person attempting to avoid being judged as less than is to fool the world (in their estimation) by putting on, what they believe to be, the clothing of the rich.

Clothing has, and continues to serve multiple purposes. Our clothes can denote our professions (i.e. military, police, doctors, mail carriers, etc.); our clothes serve as a protection from the elements, and our clothes can also beautify us. But, to make a lowly determination of a persons worth as a human being based on the clothing they wear, and treat them as such, might turn out to be one of those things we'd like to take back when we take stock of our life's journey. Knowing what value G-d places on things gives us the guidelines on how to value and what to value. Of clothing G-d says:

"O children of Adam! We have indeed sent down to you clothing to cover your private parts, and (clothing) for beauty, and clothing of righteousness, that is the best. This is of the signs of Allah (G-d) that they may be mindful." Qur'an 7:26

The clothing of righteousness. The clothing of G-d conscious character is the best, and preferred clothing. To be impoverished, wearing tattered clothing, but to have G-d consciousness is better than being draped in designer originals, while forgetting the Most High. If this thinking was the basis of our struggling and how we place value, we would not waste time pretending to be something someone else wants us to be, but would exert every effort in becoming what we were made to be.

Today, let's appraise and live with the clarity we expect to have on the day we breathe our last breaths, looking back over our lives.