The Things You Love

Love or let Go

Look around your room, your home. We should ask ourselves: what meaning and significance do all these objects have? What function? Oftentimes our homes are filled with things we neither need nor use, or even really like. I think the first step to building a home is to look around at what we have, and decide what it is that we really love and need to have around us, and what we can let go.

Our Relationship with Things

“People were created to be loved. Things were created to be used.
The reason why the world is in chaos is because things are being loved and people are being used.”

- Dalai Lama XIV

Like with food, we all have different relationships with our things. Some of us don’t really care about things at all. Others care too much. Some people have no trouble at all letting things go, others hold onto a scrap of meaningless paper dating 8 years back.

I’m not here to judge. All I am suggesting is that you become aware of your relationship to things, and then ponder the question; is this really the kind of person I want to be? Do I want to be the kind of person who has so much stuff that I can never find anything and because everything is sacred, nothing really is treated that way? Do I want to be the kind of person to whom material possessions are so important that I get stressed out as soon as someone gets crumbs on my sofa or dirt on my carpet? Do I really want my home, the reflection of my inner self, to be a collection of things that someone must have brought in at one time or other, but I never would have chosen myself, just merely gotten used to?

Why do I need so much stuff, what am I compensating for? What need am I trying to fill with having all these things? Or why don’t I put any thought in what I choose to surround myself with, am I even really present here? These are all questions that are good to ask oneself every now and again.

Building a Home

The first step to creating the most conducive home to your needs and goals, is to realise what kind of relationship you have to your things. To really think about it, think about whether this is the kind of relationship you want to be having, and then adjust.

For example: Personally, I used to let things accumulate. Not to any concerning degree, but more in a ‘just in case I’ll ever need it’ fashion. But I am also a very sensitive and creative person who thrives best in clean spaces surrounded by simple beauty (the Japanese way, I guess it is in my blood!).
So now I’m a bit of a minimalist. Not to the extreme at all, but most of what I own I either really love or really need, and I can always find exactly what I’m looking for in my home. The only items I have a little more of are books and clothes. Both of them make me happy and so I enjoy them and take care of them so that they will last. In Marie Kondo’s (in)famous words: ‘They spark joy’. What’s the point of having something if you don’t really need it or it doesn’t spark joy? To me it feels great to clean out a room and have only the essential and the meaningful in it.