Ownership is seductive.
It promises control, security, assurance. Something through which to assert one’s self, gain a sense of competence, boost one’s false sense of pride.
After all, the strong have more than the weak; the intelligent can do more, own more than dullards; those who can acquire and keep what they acquire have status and prestige in their own eyes as well as those of others.
“Look at what I have!” is the toddler’s proud proclamation to his drooling baby sister, the lanky teenager’s shout to his admiring buddies, the young professional’s claim to a higher stratum of society, the “sell” a suitor offers a potential bride, the grizzly old hoarder’s favorite sentence, the cry of glory or shriek of shame a dying soul utters while surrounded by all that would never cross the river Styx with him.
We have all heard the same sagely sayings before — what you own owns you, take care of what you have and they would take care of you, you can take nothing to the grave but what you had when you came into the world — and yet the buying and selling of things has become life itself for many of us, with the goal of “gain” or “profit” overriding almost every other motivation (except for, perhaps, a bit of altruism here and a feeble humanitarian effort there). Even in the realm of intangibles — skills, likes, relationships — the same subtle drive undergirds our well-meant approaches. It is often more, more, more; and rarely deeper, different, deliberate.
It is too easy to think that the “win” is having the thing, while the having may well be the last thing that matters. Being surrounded by toys and musical instruments and tools that are yours might impress some people for a short while; but the one fact of ownership pales in light of why you chose to acquire the stuff, what you do with them, and what sort of a person such thing has shaped you into.
“It makes me happy to have stuff, feel them, hold them, and know I could do whatever I want with them,” I say to myself sometimes. It is great having a car I could drive, speed around in, pump gas into, and show off to people. It is a lovely feeling to own enough pens to never have to wonder what to write with when ink refuses to flow in any one of them. It is comforting to step into spaces and use things I am familiar with and can adjust to my liking. And yes, it boosts my ego to see an admiring spark in my friend’s eyes when I mention or show them something I have that they do not.
Owning something has such a pull on us that sometimes we forget there are alternatives to saying “mine” over everything in sight.
Sharing what you cannot use fully with someone who would appreciate the overflow; being in public spaces and enjoying the surroundings and going-ons without having to control them; renting what you would only need for a season without having to have “your own” right now, right here.
That is how community is built and new connections are made, where giving and receiving (as opposed to buying and selling) happen, and where more things reach their full potential in use and usefulness and there is less of “hey, he took my toy!” Instead of just being limited to the imagination and abilities of one owner, things can grow, transform, and be put to use by and for more people.
(A sideways thought comes to my mind here — how are these observations reflected in our definitions of, and approaches to human relationships? We don’t “own” each other the way we own cars and houses, but there is a sense of ownership and exclusivity in certain relationships – particularly romantic ones — and I’m not quite sure where similarities begin and end between these different sorts of “ownerships.” A discussion for another day, I suppose.)
With ownership too, comes responsibility and costs of upkeep, attention, storage, and such like. Those may be lessened when people come together…
…And yet full-on communism is not a solution, as history has proven brutally over and over. There is value in private property, in the dignity and right of the individual to build his own life, in the striving for better things and the owning of what one’s efforts and intelligence produces or acquires for one.
How then should we approach ownership?
Despite the bits of clarity reached through the above notes, this dilemma remains an ongoing mulling-over for me.
“In all your getting,” the Preacher once said, “get Wisdom.”
Realizing that “getting” doesn’t have any value on its own is a good start, I think. It might not be as big of a “must” as it seems to be, either. Perhaps what we perceive as “benefits of ownership” are actually available to us without our first owning, if we get creative and careful with the connections between and usages of things around us.
One more thing to “hmmm” over for a while longer…