The Amassing of Things

Things accumulate around you in the normal course of life. For many people, their accumulation of things is a direct function of how much space is available to hold them. They may become a burden, requiring that you purge your accumulation, and it can be painful to do this, deciding what to keep and what to discard.

The amassing of things, on the other hand, is a conscious process. You intentionally seek out new things to add to your surroundings because each thing is especially pleasing. It displays your wealth, or your good taste, or you are assembling an authentic Victorian parlor in your home, or you simply take pleasure in collecting a lot of something (comic books, stamps, postcards).

We are a tool-using species. We require tools like clothes and pencils and some form of housing in order to survive, especially if we live outside the tropical environment in which we evolved. The conscious amassing of things can be thought of as making a virtue of necessity, but it can become a vice as well.

My wife and I spent many years in a large old house, and it gradually became full of things, many more things than we had an actual use for. We had books, tools, all manner of oddments. One reason for this was that we often had occasion to give people things they needed, and we had an impulse to not let useful things go to waste, going so far as to engage in “dumpster diving” (I preferred to call it “delving”, since we didn’t normally climb inside). When we moved form that house to a small apartment, by far the biggest difficulty we faced was how to “downsize”. It gave us great pleasure to be able to provide a thing that someone needed - a student with an art project, or a neighbor setting up a household.

On one occasion, a homeless man stayed with us for a few days, sleeping on our porch and having a couple of meals with us. When he was ready to move on, he mentioned that he would need to scrounge a few things, like a waterproof covering and a new pillow (I forget what-all, but it was several things), and we were pleased to be able to obtain every one of the things he felt in need of. It was as though he would be taking our hospitality with him.

We were less pleased that after accepting these things, he scolded us for being so “materialistic”, having so many things we could give them away with such a free hand. After he left, we had a decorous laugh over his remarks, thinking that he had failed to understand why we had those things, and that people unhealthily concerned with amassing things would have clung  to the things we had given him, because having twenty-seven pillows was so much more comfortable than having a mere twenty-six.

dayshttps://tellingthetruth1993.com/2020/04/30/of-the-empire-mary-oliver/

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "It is better to give than to receive - or anyway, it is more comfortable."