Possession

The other day, as my friend, Lesa, was sorting through her things, she pointed to a pot and said, "That doesn't belong to me anymore." No one else had taken possession of it (yet). She simply no longer felt ownership. She didn't feel connected to it. It didn't fit her life.

Most of us would have said, "I don't want/need that anymore." Because our relationship to our stuff is different. Maybe it's better not to feel so attached to objects. Or, maybe it's better to own only those things with which we feel some kind of unity. This goes back to the William Morris quote I cited in an earlier post:

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful,

or believe to be beautiful.”

Nearly everything we acquire felt either beautiful or useful—or both—at the time we got them. But somewhere along the line, many of the beautiful and useful things become just stuff. A mental shift occurred. The once delightful and utilitarian objects now just reside with us. They have their own lives, we have ours. They don't belong to us anymore, because we don't even think about them. Until it's time to move. Or until the hoarder intervention people show up.