I'm a highly successful hunter-gatherer. My home and studio reflect that.
I love yard sales, antique stores, thrift shops, craft galleries, hardware stores...you name almost any kind of store and I can happily shop in it for hours. I always find something that calls to be taken home. The bumper sticker "I brake for yard sales" could have been written for me.
It helps to know I'm not alone. Quilters hoard fabric, gardeners hoard seed catalogs and flower pots. Cooks collect exotic spices or recipes or kitchen gadgets. Woodworkers have barns full of wood and tools. Ordinary people collect stamps, coins, rocks, books and duck decoys. Even thrifty folks collect coupons or save rubber bands and string.
Sometimes I think I have too much "stuff". I know I could work more efficiently if my workspace were streamlined. I know my home would be easier to keep clean if it were more spare. I know there will come a time in my life where I'll HAVE to cut down on the responsibility of owning so much stuff. And I know my relationships with people are much, much more important than anything I own.
But I still love, love, love my STUFF.
I had a delightful conversation about STUFF a few days ago with the owner of a flower shop here in Keene. In the Company of Flowers is a beautiful store, with lovely floral arrangements and potted plants. The owner, Mary, also offers an eclectic assortment of gifts and home accessories, all beautiful and unusual. I always enjoy browsing there and often leave with a trinket or two.
I'd just discovered a strand of unusual beads, like nothing I'd ever seen before. I could not take my eyes off them. My budget brain fought with my primitive hunter-gatherer brain, and the budget brain lost. The beads were soon mine. They sit by my keyboard even now as I write so I can enjoy looking at them.
I asked Mary what she knew about them. She told me about the bead dealer she'd bought them from. I told her about my own bead collection, especially my strands of antique African trade beads. She told me about her collection of "kissy pennies", antique metal pieces with enigmatic shapes used for money in some parts of Africa. "I just love how they look, so organic, so spiritual," she said, her hands moving to illustrate their shape. "There's something about them that moves me deeply."
As we talked about our unusual collections, she told me the story of a good friend who had recently died. He had amassed an amazing collection of objects. When his estate was disbursed, it was broken up and auctioned off in bits and pieces.
But instead of feeling sad, she said, she felt elated. And at peace. While he lived, she said, he enjoyed his collection so much. And now it was disassembled and put back out into the world for many, many other people to see, to be collected and cherished again.
She said, "I've let go of the idea that we actually ever OWN anything. We just have the keeping of it until it finds it's way back into the water again."
I told her I felt the same way.
There are people who claim they hate shopping, or who periodically purge their belongings. We all go through periods of de-cluttering, letting go of certain things. After all, it IS just "stuff". And in the end, we all know that relationships and people are always more important than any "thing" we own.
But being attached to stuff is NOT just a nuisance, nor a character flaw. Nor is it self-deception about true priorities or our own mortality.
Collecting stuff is a deeply human activity. It tells much about who we are and who we'd like to be.
People come into the world as unique individuals. We feel connection to certain kinds of things.
We accrue those things, or collect them. These items aggregates around us.
Then, when we die, that aggregation disperses, entering the stream again. And other people find those same pieces, find joy in them and gather them. The cycle starts again, over and over, century after century.
Each collection is unique. A stamp dealer once told me that in over 50 years of selling stamps, she never met two people who collected exactly the same stamps.
Somehow, certain objects speaks to us. At the same time, our collections reveal something about us. From the collectors of the finest art in the world to the hoarder of string and rubber bands, what we collect says something about who we are, what we fear, what we value and what we yearn for. Our stuff helps us remember a certain time, a certain place, perhaps even a certain person. Our collections can give us solace and amusement, curiosity and knowledge, beauty and joy.
Yes, there is a spectrum, as in any human behavior, from one extreme to the other. But it is still a process that I find heartbreakingly human.
As time passes, there is a lovely warp and weft of people and things, a tapestry that shows rich and colorful and unusual patterns. All the cloth of humanity.
So go ahead and enjoy YOUR stuff. If it bothers you, sort out whether that comes from how YOU feel about it or how OTHERS feel about it. If others, how much do you care? Find your own balance point between the convenience of having less stuff and pleasure it brings you.
As another friend quipped years ago, "I LOVE my stuff, and I'm not getting rid of it! I don't care what they do with it after I'm dead. They can build a pyramid above me and fill it to the top with my stuff for all I care! I'll be gone!!"
