Possessions: are they slowing us down?

The good Archbishop John Shahovskoy wrote that “a man has less property than he thinks. It is only in his imagination that a millionaire owns his millions – in truth they own him. For the most part he is fettered by them, compelled to a certain style of living, bound up with a particular set of people” of course he than talks about how this leads to spiritual depreciation, but I do him injustice as he has written a whole discourse on the philosophy of ownership. In fact I agree with the good Bishop to a certain extent, possessions can fetter you, the house we own, the cars we have, the life we have all require a base income which we need to work for, these costs carry on whether we work or not, your possessions in effect are part of the motivation to work. However the problem tends to affect the middle class more than the poor or rich, if the rich man were prudent he would not need to worry about financial security which then allows him to spend time on those higher pursuits, take my friend Ian; he seems to spend most of his time fishing, however I know that at one stage he worked hard and surrounded himself with possessions that the Author of “Rich Dad Poor Dad”, Robert Kiyosaki would be proud of. The poor on the other hand are more concerned with the basics of living than possessions although the number of murders over bottles of alcohol might suggest my logic is flawed, but I digress.

We have fluctuated between three options, taking it all, leaving it all or an option I will call prudential pruning, taking some things that are more important to us than others. At the basis of these considerations is the cost associated with the different options. If we had unlimited cash reserves I am not sure we would be debating this, we would just take what we wanted, the transport costs to Canada are however excessive which brings us to the second option sell it all, take the money and buy alternatives for basic living on that side. There are a few thoughts around this, selling your possessions is difficult, you don’t get anything for that bed that you bought for a small fortune (why? It is second hand and not antique) and you will not be able to buy something of equal quality for the pittance you receive for it. On the other hand you are saving those excessive costs of transport so in fact you can add that to your stash.

If only it were so easy, it seems that some of our possessions have special meaning and we would like to take them with us, possessions are sometimes more than just things, they provide us with glimpses of our past, both shared and alone, remind us of those that are left behind, remind us of special occasions, good times and bad. Most of these items are not functional, that bottle we received from the priest when we got married, we have plans for that bottle, we don’t need these objects to make a living but they are visual clues to who we are and where we come from, they may only be important to us but as such they have more value than many of the more functional items in our possession which we can replace anywhere. Option three therefore looks like the option we will take, the middle option, i.e. those things that we cannot buy on the other side, it will cost something not as much as everything and more than nothing. We still cannot take everything we want to; the table my grandfather made is too big to take and needs to go to someone who can appreciate it but a lot of other things are far more mobile and these will be going.

While there is no doubt that there is a lot of emotion in some of the things that are being left behind, our tastes change over time and although it is painful now I am not to sure that it will matter even in the short term, if I really think about it, it is going to be quite exciting to be a little footloose, without huge base expenses, no insurance, car, house, security, medical ect. No doubt as good middle class consumers we will once again be mired in things before to long, but perhaps, for now, we should learn to let go, perhaps we should remind ourselves of what is really important in life and perhaps we should revel in the fact that we are starting with a relatively clean slate, who knows what’s waiting around the corner.