It’s so interesting that this is a title for today, because it’s a thought process I have been having over the past couple of days prompted by the fact that I am starting to realise in my home, we have too much ‘stuff’.
I have, in my dining room, a mahogany table and chairs and and sideboard that are 55 years old. They were purchased by my parents the year before I was born. It has moved between my parents, my grandparents, and me in those 55 years. From London to Essex to Suffolk, back to Essex, and back to Suffolk. My early years birthdays were celebrated around that table, roughly 45 Christmases have been celebrated around it, it has played a central role in many New Years Eve parties, and it has held the food, and seated the bottoms of people for countless dinner parties. I don’t walk past that table and have memories of the childhood parties, Christmases etc. I have those memories as an intrinsic part of me. They are prompted by photos, by reminiscences, or by something I see or hear that triggers the memory. The table in and of itself, doesn’t.
I have ornaments, furniture, clothes, endless amounts of ‘stuff’ that I barely see anymore. It’s just there. There are items that are sentimental, items that I think are beautiful, but I have realised recently something my mother said to me when I was reluctant to release some of the material things of my grandmother is so pertinent with belongings – she said to me that if I didn’t have the memories of the love I had for my grandmother and she for me, then holding onto her things wasn’t going to change that.
My grandmother lives on in my memories, as does my grandfather, but not in the 40th wedding anniversary glasses I have in my glass cabinet. I remember the lovely dinner we went for on that occasion, in 1984, the fun and laughter we all had. I remember wanting to recreate their wedding cake so asking my grandmother about it, and her laughing and saying ‘no, thanks’ because of course, their wedding cake, such as it had been, had been made with wartime rations. They’d gotten married while my grandfather was on shore leave, on Christmas Eve 1944, and he’d had to return to his boat on the 26th. There are no photographs of their wedding, though I do still have her beautiful wedding dress, but I have memories of them talking about their wedding at that dinner. I remember asking my grandmother one evening, before this anniversary, why she had married my grandfather. Without pausing for breath, she just said drily ‘because I felt sorry for his mother’. I was scandalised, and asked what he’d done that was so bad and she’d sighed, and said ‘I couldn’t possibly tell you’. All the while my grandfather was sitting there, listening and rolling his eyes. Then they had looked at each other, and shared a loving smile.
I have a beautiful dinner service which is brought out for Christmas and dinner parties. Parts of it are antique and were bought for my mother by her staff when she sold her first business. It’s been added to over the years, but for the most part it sits in that mahogany sideboard, rarely used. I also have a silver cutlery set that accompanies the dinner service for ‘best use’, and gathers dust the rest of the time. All beautiful, but I never look at them and think of the lovely dinners that have been eaten off them. I look at the friends those dinners were eaten with, and might ask if they remember when such and such happened at that dinner party, and we will laugh at the memory. I also look at photographs that remind me of those occasions.
What I guess I am trying to say is that – what does holding personal belongings dear, mean? We can fill our lives with ‘stuff’ and form emotional attachments to it, but what is the basis of that emotional attachment? I read an article about Jeremy Renner just this morning who said that, after his near death experience a couple of years ago, he realised that the material stuff isn’t important. That we can’t take it with us when we die, but that we can take love with us, and leave it behind as the most impactful legacy of our lives. If we love and are loved in our life, then (as I said in a previous blog), that is a legacy because that love will flow through the generations. I barely met either of my great-grandmothers, but they loved me and I love them because their memories have been kept alive for me by the people who did know them and adored them. My son never met my grandparents, but he knows all about them and loves them, as they love him. Personal belongings don’t come into it. I realised during my cancer journey that love was the most important thing because, like Jeremy Renner, I felt that love from Source, from spirit. It was the most beautiful experience I’ve ever had next to the birth of my son, where I also felt that spiritual love. That love is in me, not in personal belongings.
Too often, we are trapped by our five senses. This feeling that if we can see or touch something that perhaps belonged to a loved one, or has a sentimental attachment to us because of an experience in our lives, we can keep the memories alive. But, as my mother said, they’re either in us or they are not. I remember reading a Wayne Dyer book where he was having a conversation with a neurosurgeon who said that in all their surgeries, they had seen a brain but never a soul or consciousness. And saying it in a way to deny their existence. And Wayne Dyer responded with – in all your brain surgeries, have you ever seen a memory, or love, or the knowledge you hold to conduct the brain surgery? What we see, hear, feel, smell, taste are all determined by our Reticular Activating System. It’s not real, it’s all a programme. We see what we expect to see based on past experience, values and our belief system stored in our subconscious, and everything that doesn’t fit into that is filtered out. We cannot see that process happening in the brain, but neuroscientists agree that the Reticular Activating System exists and works in that way. We don’t see our memories in the 3D, they exist in our soul, in our conscious mind when we want to recall them, and in our subconscious mind. All the times I would go into my grandparent’s garden because it was the best place to find my grandfather and have a chat with him when I wanted advice is there in my memory. I have nothing else physical to attach that experience to, the garden is owned by someone else now, but nothing and no one can take that memory from me.
One of my mother’s customers said to her once ‘you can’t always keep things no matter how sentimental, but you have the memory, and if you lose that you’ve likely lost everything so it no longer matters’. She was a Holocaust survivor who lost all her material possessions and most of her family including her parents. But she had her memories, her love of her family, and as she said, if she lost those forever, the likelihood was she had lost her quality of life anyway. My friend’s mother had a stroke or something similar (the medical community can’t identify what it was) that means every morning she wakes up, she can’t remember anything from her life pretty much. She has no memories of the time she has spent with her grandchildren, she has no memories of her own children, of any part of her life. She knows this, and finds it hugely upsetting in a strange kind of way because the people that tell her about the events etc. are like strangers to her, including her husband and children. Her quality of life is, according to my friend, all-but non-existent because she barely ever leaves the house now whereas she had been an incredibly successful and very intelligent woman in all sorts of ways, regularly travelling with her husband and with a very active social life. All of which has now gone.
So, to answer the question, I do have a lot of personal belongings and I like them a lot. But, and it is a big but, the personal belongings I hold most dear are the intangible. They are the love and memories that I have accumulated over my lifetime so far, and which will continue to live with me no matter what happens to my physical belongings.
Louisa Simpson 