What Do We Truly Own?

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The other day I looked at the corner of a room in the house I’ve lived in for twenty-three years. The rocking chair was gone — temporarily moved. My mind came into focus. I could see for the first time what that corner will look like when, through death or sale, we leave this house for good. It will be empty, the record of our lives here dissolved like heartless amnesia.

I didn’t know what to feel.

This isn’t my house after all, is it? I thought. It’s only mine for a time.

While I’ve known this intellectually, looking at that empty corner, I felt the sudden erasure of our time here. I felt the erasure of us.

Even though I own this house — together with the bank — what does “own” mean? In this instance, it means I own the right to accumulate equity in this asset. Even if my family owned this house for its entire existence, we wouldn’t own the land it sits on — only the rights to it. Even if the government I live under owns some rights to the land, it won’t own them longer than the time it’s in power. If our species owns any of this, it’s temporary. Ownership is time limited. Is ownership about time then?

How do we experience ownership? It feels much different to own my well-worn jacket or Grandma’s chair than it does to own the paint on my bedroom wall.

We own creatures, too — pets, children. “That’s my kid,” we say. We own precious objects, but only for a time. If they’re precious enough, they move to a new owner in the family and suddenly the object has a continuum of owners. Does this mean ownership is a collective?

We own things from Earth, the great lender. We pay a lot of sweat and crouching to own our gardens. Where we live, it feels as if we own the trees and plants, the sand and dirt. But these things are borrowed. We always give them back.

Even our families are as temporary a possession to us as we are to them. While family members don’t own each other, we live life with an understanding that our families are a part of ourselves in some way. Family is only family because a delicate ribbon of unique history ties it together. I don’t say to any old family, you’re mine and I’m yours.

Depending on what you believe, family might last forever or not. But in this life, as I wonder what I truly own, they are a short-lived, beloved phenomenon.

What I might own then, is a collection of decades’ worth of my experience. This collection is unique because it’s not an object and it’s not a fleeting creature. Instead, it’s a curated understanding of my life. Will it live forever? I’d argue it doesn’t matter because its preciousness lies in the fact that it represents the miracle of my life. You can’t negate the miracle of my life — or yours. It will always be a mind-boggling fact.

Over time, I’ll carry this collection with care through the door of my grandparent’s home, my childhood home, and my children’s home until one day I’ll arrive at the edge of the world. Then I’ll place it down where no one will ever touch it. It will be the one thing in the entire universe only I own.

Since I’m the curator of this collection, it begs the question, what do I want to own?

I can put whatever I want in that collection. I can shovel things into it. I can cram things in. I can mindlessly pile whatever comes my way into the middle of that collection.

But why? Why would I pay no heed to how I create the only thing I’ll ever own?

For one, it’s human to not realize that what we do sometimes is mindless shoveling. We consume irrelevance, contrariness, frustration, worry, and lifeless repetition.

We don’t notice we’re stocking repetitive anger and jealousy onto the shelves of this reverent collection or worry and regret. In my collection, I have shelves of fruitless questioning, a spinning of worthless what-if’s. When I finally arrive at the edge of the world to carefully place my collection into its permanent spot, how will I feel about those spinning moments? Will I think they’re beautiful?

Someday my mom and her siblings will sell the lake house that has been in the family for generations. This means they’ll sell the dragonflies and the ferns there, and The Rock that juts off the beach into the water, where we jumped off into the lake during the day and lay atop at night to gape at the deep astronomy many trillions of miles away.

There will be a liquidation of the piles of decks of cards and boardgames covered thick with our family’s fingerprints and laughter, feigned trash-talk, and roasted peanut debris which covered the one hand that wasn’t holding the cards. The sound of thunder heard from the slider couch on the covered porch will be sold off. The decades of snores and dreams that dropped onto the floorboards from a slew of beds through the cricket-laden summer nights will finally be gone.

Except, this isn’t true. There is no selling of these things. There is only selling of walls, floors, and a roof. These dragonflies and snores, these peanuts and crickets — they will follow me to the edge of the world one day where I’ll place them down and realize how lucky I was to have noticed enough to collect them.

Hope you're well, friends.