What are we really collecting?

I think I’ve accidentally developed a new philosophy for life. It began with a conversation about possessions, when I realised somewhere in the middle of it that I genuinely don’t care very much about owning things anymore. I came to Lisbon 5 years ago after packing down a 3 bedroom house, with 2 suitcases & I’ve never lacked a thing. If anything, my life has become fuller while the amount of stuff I own has become smaller.

It made me think about how much of our lives we spend accumulating things. We buy them, store them, insure them, clean them, move them from one home to another & sometimes buy larger homes simply to accommodate them. We even buy entirely new pieces of furniture whose sole purpose is to contain more of the things we have collected. We become their caretakers, until one day, when we are no longer here, somebody else opens the cupboards.

Our treasured possessions are lifted from shelves, taken out of drawers & sorted into piles. Things to keep, things to sell, things to give away & things that nobody quite understands why we held on to in the first place. Objects that once seemed so important return to being simply objects. Strangely, I don’t find this depressing. I find it enormously freeing.

Of course, some possessions carry meaning. The things I treasure most from my mum are her tea caddy & a stupid little drinks mat that tells me to live my own life beautifully. I have my granny’s silver serving spoon, which she used to mix every cake she made, my dad’s first toy, a little red wooden car, a wooden doorstop just because I hated this one slammy door in our house & a moonstone necklace from Tim because I used to howl at the full moon. None of these things has any real monetary value, but each one leads me back to a person I loved. They offer a feeling of closeness. When I hold them, use them or simply notice them sitting in my home, the person they belonged to feels a little less far away.

Perhaps that’s the difference. Some things are merely things, while others become vessels for memory, carrying a fragment of a person & the life we shared with them. Perhaps it was never the object itself that mattered. Perhaps it was always the love held inside it.

The same is increasingly true for me with money. I want enough money to feel secure, to have choices, to be generous, to travel, to eat fabulous food, to help the people I love & to say yes when an adventure appears. Money is incredibly useful when it enables us to live, but accumulating it simply for the comfort of watching the number grow feels increasingly strange when the number of days available to us is always becoming smaller.

I’ve even begun questioning our obsession with leaving a legacy. We are often encouraged to build something that will outlive us, to make our mark & to be remembered. But perhaps nobody will remember who I was in 100 years. Would that make the life I lived any less valuable? I don’t think it would. I was still here. I loved people, laughed until I couldn’t breathe, travelled, swam in oceans, sat around tables with people I adored & ate ridiculous food. I did work that mattered to me, changed my mind, fucked things up, began again, learnt things, helped people, collected stories & experienced the completely improbable privilege of being alive. Maybe that is enough.

Perhaps a life doesn’t need to echo through eternity to have mattered. Perhaps its value can be found in the people we loved while we were here, the moments in which we were fully present & the small ways another person’s life became lighter, richer or more hopeful because ours touched it.

I think this is where I’m landing: own what serves the life. Earn what enables the life. Keep the people who enrich the life. Collect experiences, connection, curiosity, joy & memories. And don’t spend the finite resource, your actual time, maintaining possessions, relationships or identities that no longer serve the life you want to be living.

We talk endlessly about how we spend our money, but the thing we are really spending every day is our time. Money can sometimes be earned again. Possessions can be replaced. Homes can be rebuilt. Lives can change direction in ways we never imagined. But time passes only once.

So perhaps the question isn’t simply what we want to leave behind. Perhaps it is what we want to be doing, feeling, noticing, giving & loving while we are still here. As for me, I’m going to spend mine living, preferably for quite a while yet, because I still have an enormous amount of shit I want to do. ❤️

So my question for you is which things do you hold most precious, & why?

With love,
Jo x