How closely do you listen to what you say? I’ve been doing a bit more of that recently for a number of reasons. One is that I am working with Julia Cameron’s latest offering The Listening Path. Another is that someone has stepped into my conversational life in a massive way. Massive. That’s one of their words, not one of mine. And that’s the thing that set me off on listening to myself.
I’ve started to write this piece a number of times and this is the point where I normally veer off to talk about language, the power of words, how we adopt phraseology from the people around us, all of which is another blog for another day. The thing I want to home in on, is one of the things I hadn’t realised that I do.
By becoming attuned to the habits of some of the people around me, I got to thinking about my own verbal tics. And one in particular. The one that intrigues me relates to my “stuff”.
By “stuff” in this context, I mean actual, tangible objects.
Regular readers will know that I underwent a major life change and so haven’t been in my current home for very long. So just about everything in here is here by choice. My rule for making such choices is still William Morrison’s injunction regarding useful or beautiful.
What I’ve noticed is that when anyone picks up on an item in my home, I find that I have to give them the full back-story, explaining each item as though I have to justify its presence it terms of its usefulness or its perceived beauty.
This is my home, and I live alone. I have no need to justify what I give house-room to. I like it. And/or I use it. That should be sufficient. Although I’m not the most house-proud person on the planet, I don’t live in clutter – it’s not like I even have to justify any of my stuff to myself. It is all here because at some point within the last two years I decided I wanted it: wanted to keep it and to have it either on display or in use or both.
So I’m intrigued by this habit of mine…of ‘telling the story’ of what things are, how I came to have them, what they mean to me, why they’re here.
I am still working this out, but I think the essence of it is that our “stuff” is not “just stuff”.
The things we choose to keep and/or to use go beyond whatever function they may serve, they are also the embodiment of memory, of self, of potential (fulfilled or otherwise). They are marks of achievement. They are captured moments of time. Things are not just things. They are symbols, metaphors, miracles. Moments.
I keep coming back to that word: moments.
Because that’s all life is: a very long, flexible, mutable, twisting, turning, stretching, contracting, knotting, unravelling, dancing, pausing, string of moments. A rope to be jumped. Or a rope-flow to be joined.
And we are the creatures trying to capture the bubble-moment, the one that holds the string together, forgetting that none of them do, and all of them do.
When I look around my stuff, I see my life caught like a winter-morning spider’s web – diamonds glittering that I can only see because I am looking at those past moments through the prism of the light of this one.
None of my stuff has intrinsic value. None of it is worth anything because of what it is.
Some stuff only has functional value: it is useful. I have no attachment to it beyond that it serves its purpose, but when I start to think...I realise that fewer and fewer of my things fit into that category. More and more of them come with a fragment of my story attached to them.
My story is the extrinsic value of these objects. They matter not because of what they are or how I use them, but because of how I see them, how I came by them, of what I know of their past or how it relates to mine. Even something as simple as the plates that I eat off…are not just plates. They are tiny embedded stories of who I am and how I came to be me here now.
We diminish this, I think, when we call it sentimental value – because we have diminished the word ‘sentimental’. Sentiment. Feeling.
In the west we have elevated the thinking and demoted the feeling. When I look at my ‘stuff’ as more than “just stuff” I am re-elevating the feeling part of who I am and what I care about. I am wandering back through my life and how these things came to be in it. Maybe none of that matters to anyone but me. In noticing my habit of wanting to tell the back story of things, maybe I am wanting to tell the backstory of me. Maybe this is part of trying to weave myself into the web of everything that is.
When I value things I have inherited as much for their age as for the continuity of ownership, that speaks to my own interests and values. It speaks to connections that I wish I had and don’t…things I wish I knew and don’t…and sometimes, maybe, it just speaks to the fact that I find some things beautiful or amazing simply because of how old they are.
When I value the everyday objects – and most of what I value is truly everyday-stuff, of no great age or provenance – then I can’t escape it the nagging doubt: that I simply want to be anchored in some way, even if it just to my own younger self.
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