Something is happening, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, I am starting to feel things that I have known people to feel just before they died. But I’m too young to die. So why am I feeling these things.
I was sitting in my living room reading last night and I glanced at some of the artifacts of the places I have been and the things that I have done in my life and almost one by one, I was thinking of people who would enjoy them and made a decision to gift them to each of them respectively the next time I saw them.
For a moment I reflected on what I would put in the place of each item once I had gifted the item that was originally there. And I assured myself, that I there will be other things, but at the same time was thinking, at least in the moment, other things are not necessary. I decided I could rearrange the remaining things that still had some value to me, although much less than they used to, around and I could use the extra space. That’s how I saw it last night.
Then this morning, I went to the bank and across the street from the bank was a store where I had shopped for many things over the years that I have lived in my current neighborhood. The store was closing and everything in the store was marked down considerably. I had money in my wallet and was all ready to go on a shopping spree. As I walked through the store, I looked at many items, all of which I would have bought in a heart beat, especially at the new discounted price. But I didn’t.
In fact, I felt nothing as I walked by them. The thought of owning all the beautiful things I saw, did nothing for me, at least at the moment. I could afford them, but did I need them? And sometimes things aren’t a matter of need, but want. Okay, so, did I really want them? I guess the answer was no, because I left the store without buying a single things. Mind you, I had shopped in this store many times, and bought things at full price, and now at the discounted rate, still I bought nothing.
These items were not out of style, they weren’t old discounted Holiday items, they weren’t broken, they weren’t returns, these were brand new, in, today…, just going out of business and on sale.
Interestingly enough, a book jumped out of a shelf, no, not literally, but it caught my eye as I walked by it dazed and confused. “Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things,” by Randy O. Frost & Gail Steketee. Things, hmm. I wonder what this was trying to tell me.
Befre long I started to think, “What’s wrong with me? Am I dying?” The only people I have heard say the kinds of things that I was feeling were old people who were in their final years, and accepted it, or people that were sick and knew they were on their way out. I would hear such comments as “I don’t need anything anymore,” or “Things don’t have the same meaning to me anymore.”
But I want things, I want them to have meaning. Maybe that’s it, maybe the things that have meaning to me now aren’t the same things that had meaning to me before. Maybe I don’t give meaning to the things that I have been told to give meaning to all my life. Maybe I am starting to give meaning to things that I want to give meaning to. Or better yet, maybe “things” don’t have meaning to me as much anymore as people, and experiences and dreams, and…
Maybe I’m not dying after all. Maybe I am actually just starting to live, maybe even for the first time in my life. I live.