The Comfort and Burden of Belongings

On several occasions this week, I’ve found myself looking around my living room, feeling comforted by my belongings and then feeling burdened by them. I’m fascinated by why people keep certain objects and what meaning they hold. When I was a young girl, my parents had an antiques business on the side, and they collected old and previously owned objects. I’ve come to believe that my mother collected these things because of the magic they held for her, and that my father collected them because he believed that they’d someday be worth something more than what he paid for them.

I inherited my mother’s tendency to feel the magic that objects hold. After both of my parents died, I created a body of photographic work titled Inherited Objects that explores this attachment to belongings that seem to hold magic or connection to a person. I feel both comforted and burdened by these objects.

When talking with one of my Dharma teachers this morning, she suggested, “Comfort is an internal state that we project onto an object. It can be activated in our imagination of the object or the person [to whom the object belonged].” She encouraged me to consider that the object is simply a mirror of something reflected back to me, and that “if we forget that, we think it’s the object we need rather than the felt sense that the object gives us. Recognize the suffering that comes in the holding on. The peace that you’re wanting is an internal state.”

The experience of being in silence in the woods last Saturday certainly gave me a much greater sense of belonging in nature than I feel when I hold my treasured moonsnail shell. The energy of creativity and aliveness is so much larger when I am being present in nature than when I am looking at an inkwell on my desk. And my feelings of connection to my father are deeper when I recall a memory of fishing with him on the lake of my childhood than when I see one of his books, ironically titled A Fortune in the Junk Pile, on my bookshelf. In fact, I feel burdened by owning this book, and I’ve been living for several years with the delusion that owning it helps me to feel connected with my father.

After we discussed the comfort and burden of these belongings, my Dharma teacher suggested that I take a few moments to close my eyes and feel into my current aspirations. My aspirations include living connected to nature, free, alive, creative, and joyful. She then encouraged me to see clearly my own heart and situation with wisdom and compassion and to hold my aspiration.

When I hung up the phone, I went back to my bookshelf and found A Fortune in the Junk Pile, which, during our conversation, I had decided to give away to a relative for Christmas. When I took it off the shelf and held it, the book that had previously represented a connection with my father had become a representation of my newfound insight into the comfort and burden of objects, and I felt a tug to keep it as a reminder. Sigh… I still have a ways to go with this letting go thing.

To what do you cling? What meaning does it hold for you? Use your mindful journaling practice to write about how you can find that state of being internally.

Jen Johnson is a mindfulness teacher, coach, and therapist offering an integrative approach to mind body healing and creative awakening.