What Became of it

I was thinking the other day about some vintage gloves I'd given away to an acquaintance, one I'd hoped would become a friend but never did. I wondered if they had ever been worn, if perhaps they had been thrown away or sold. I was sad, and wished that I had kept them, but of course I couldn't as I was frantically downsizing in a crisis and couldn't take them with me. It's hard to come to terms with a fizzled friendship, but it's easy to focus on the material objects we held in common for a while. Why did our friendship not flourish? So many subtle reasons, so many factors I can never wholly know and have probably embellished or forgotten in time. But I can clearly see the gloves: they were mine, and then they were a gift that made me feel generous and joyful in a time of grief, and then they were gone and so was the recipient. Her features have faded in my memory; the pattern of the gloves has not. Why?

It happens, that sometimes we give away objects and they don't make the recipients as glad as we'd hoped, or they don't seem as tied to them (or, if we extrapolate as object-oriented people often do, to us) as we'd imagined they would be.  Maybe we'd given away something we were still emotinally attached to, because we cared for a person or because we had too many objects and hoped to find new, caring homes for some of them. Maybe we thought the person needed that thing, but they didn't see it that way.  Maybe wastefulness upsets us, and we watch things being heaved in a dumpster with horror. Maybe it's upsetting that we kept some stupid thing (rubber band ball, anyone?) for years and it's just plain worthless to everyone we ask, and no home can be found for it. We cannot make someone cherish
anyone or anything at all, but how sad that we still try. That some part of us is weak enough that we feel we must try.


A daughter accepts her grandmother's china, when the mother offers it; later the mother notices it is now underneath the houseplants and catching a drip from the radiator.  A son lets his small children play with his dad's minor league baseball mitt, and they leave it out in the rain. Your friend gives her cousin the expensive cocktail dress she'd taken when you two went through your closet after your pregnancy made you unable to wear your favorite old clothes. Another friend puts for sale on Amazon some of the books you gave her when you got divorced and had to downsize. You are told by a knowledgeable friend that most of what you gave the thrift store ended up in landfill. The relief you felt at unburdening yourself of some object for someone else's joy evaporates. The gift had a purpose, after all. Memories would be preserved.

It's easy to shame someone who's feeling slighted or depressed about the recipients of their goods not being obligated in some minor way to keep what they were given, to show some form of respect for the gift or to the giver. Much has been written on the pain of being an unwilling recipient of stuff, of the burden of ownership and the anxiety of being beholden. It's hard, isn't it, to be on either end of gifts of possessions in trying times. Maybe you truly want a thing a friend or family member wants to give you but you honestly do not have the space, the time, or the means to receive it. It is hard to inherit; it is hard to let go. My memory is not your memory; my objects are not your objects, and the objects are not a substitute for either of us, no matter how much either of us may wish it to be so. Still, even though I know it, still it makes me want to hold on to things I like for dear life, frankly. For dear life.

Hold onto it, or them, for dear life. What is that, anyhow? Hold on to the life; the life of the giver, the life of the receiver. Well, life is precious, isn't it? And how do we actually hold anything at all, if not in our hands? Many people talk about holding something in their hearts and minds, but if you are like me, that phrase sounds like what we say when a loved one dies: we'll keep them in our hearts and minds. Is that ever as good as holding them again? No. To cherish a thing is to see it and touch it. Our attachments, yours and mine, are physical ones as well as psychological.

There's a strong and well known theory that when people must part with objects, it's best not to allow them to touch them or they will want to keep them. In my experience this has been true. To hold up an item and say "keep or donate" is much different than to pass it to them and let them touch the softness of an old tshirt or the weight of a knickknack. Sometimes I think it is a kindness to have someone sit in a chair and just ask them yea or nay about stuff rather than have them physically sort. Decisions are harder when we touch an object, or put it down forever in a box. That is not to say we should not make some of those decisions; but if the human brain can only process so many decisions in a day why force some of them to be decisions about silverware and coffee cups, when pictures and such are obviously more important? I don't believe every decision about possessions needs to be carefully thought through. Of course there will be regrets. Avoiding all regrets in life is what gets us in trouble with people and possessions in the first place.  But we can minimize those regrets by limiting the number of important choices we make at one time, by delegating simple choices to someone we trust or tackling them in big caches to make room for more difficult ones. Still, at some point we will have to make those difficult choices. Talking to the right person about them can help.

But why do we hold on to things as though they were beloved people, anyhow? Well, for starters, many times objects are all we have left of a loved one. Many objects are considerably more durable than a person, and sometimes too when people let us down comforting objects are still around. One of the great lessons we learn as babies is about object impermanence. Things continue to exist even when we can't perceive them. A subtle dance exists between what's in the hand or seen by the eye and what is real at all. What if those objects seem more permanent than our caretakers? What if we come to expect people to disappear at random, but objects to persist? What if people seem to forget about *us* when we aren't right in front of them (or worse, don't respond to us even if we are right there)? People can be such a source of anxiety. Objects have different anxieties attached to them, don't they? Since they don't have minds of their own, they can't leave us but through our own negligences of one sort or another. People can just walk away at any time for unknowable reasons. They often do.

And what about when people take our objects away - as punishment, for cruelty or neglect, from theft or just from ignorance?  Pehaps we clutch what we have left a little more tightly, or perhaps we learn to give away our possessions quickly so that we never become attached at all.

Quantitatively, what is it reasonable to own, much less to cherish, anyhow? Unreasonable? Obviously those are personal questions for everyone who isn't immediately subject to someone else's needs and wants (although most of us do live with others, or at least within boundaries which border on the property of others). Many people attempt to live within convention - possessing just a little more than those around us, or perhaps purposefully a little less, to show our superiority. Those are powerful messages, to advertise our wealth and show off our ability to comfort ourselves well, telling the outside world and ourselves who we are and how much we matter.

Others live unconventionally, by design or accident, possessing much more - or much less - than what is typical for their cohort. It happens to artists, it happens to bankers, it happens to everyone. They may be blissfully unaware of these facts, or painfully aware. If you're here and reading this, you are most likely in the painful section and you are not alone. I'm there, too, even though I'm pretty self-aware and I work on it every day. I stay within convention, but it is not an easy task - I am glad for it, though. When I step outside convention I almost immediately start floundering in the upkeep and organization of my possessions, and that just plain sucks. Even if I could afford someone to come fix it for me, I just don't want to do that. I find myself getting down on myself without knowing exactly why. I feel better emotionally and physically when I can live within my means, and not just financially. When I own "too little," I also feel anxious and unhappy. Bereft. Angry. Paranoid of losing what I have. It is then that my own tendencies to hoard start to hover and influence my decisions, and it seems like overnight I have a ton of things I don't actually care that much about, just to have things in my life. Yes, that is counterproductive, but it happens to me and maybe it happens to you.

The borders of my possessions certainly fluctuate.. Sometimes I am perfectly content with relatively little, and sometimes I wake up and get excited and motivated by an overflowing project room. But when the borders are changing, I can go up and down in mood a LOT while in the process of adjustment. Ideally I have time and space to figure it out in my free time withoug it being much of an issue. That hasn't always been so, and I try to always be aware of potential time crunches. It's been a rare job where a client wasn't in a crisis over matters other than just the stuff in the way, or when time wasn't loudly ticking overhead as we sorted.

Really, sorting out stuff so that all you own makes you happy is not that straighforward a task. There is the matter of borders and contstraints, walls, boundaries. There's the matter of how much is enough, what holes need to be filled, what confidences need to be bolstered, what conventions must be considered and why. I can enjoy, even admire, a spare aesthetic, but it's not usually what I choose for myself. I am not happy in chaos, dispirited in cramped spaces, but not comfortable in warehouse-like rooms filled with boxes and boxes of stuff, either. I hate living in basements and attics. Knowing and defining my possessions helps me to know and define myself, and knowing my limits and my weaknesses about possessions helps me to make decisions which affect every aspect of my life from the ethical to the romantic. Ruminating over a pair of lost gloves helps me realize how lonely I must be feeling if I'm still mourning the loss of a friendship that never flowered, and I can take steps to reach out and try again with someone new. How are you?