It’s easy to take the mental step from “want” to “need” without even realizing it. For example, how many of us have said “I need a new car” when, in fact, your old one still runs fine and gets you places, but it looks bad and isn’t as exciting as the new one you’ve had your eye on. Before you even know it, you’re telling yourself “I need a new car.” The truth is, you just want it.
We do that a lot. Americans are particularly gifted at this, I think, and folks with ADD/ADHD have this ability in spades. So, a lot of you, though you might not want to admit it, get stuff you don’t really need, but you convince yourself you do (and I’m not excluding myself from this–we all do it to some extent).
We love our stuff. We hold onto it tightly, showing off the newer stuff at times–“Look at my new MacBook Pro–it’s got 4GB of RAM and…” But in the end, it’s just stuff. We need to remember that. All our cameras and computers and cars and houses and clothes and jewelry…well, just about anything that we can buy is just stuff and we have to understand that it can all go away no matter what we do to protect it.
In other words, the physical stuff in our life isn’t half as important as we make it out to be and we don’t need anywhere near as much of it as we might convince ourselves.
I bring this up because of this:
This is an iPhone shot of my oldest brother’s house in central Atlanta. Last night, another huge oak tree fell on it taking out a significant part of the 2nd floor master suite and kitchen beneath and damaging their new Prius that was parked on the right side of the house.
He and his wife were not hurt.
Stuff? Lots gone or damaged. But the important things–John and Sammy–are fine.
Oh, and did you catch that I said “another huge oak tree fell?” This is the second time their house has been severely damaged by a falling tree. The first time was over 10 years ago (that one was arguably worse, actually) and they, again, managed to get out unhurt. They rebuilt and re-bought their stuff then, and they will again now.
We spend lots of time and energy and money protecting the physical stuff of our lives. We have insurance (or we should–if you don’t, please look again at that photo and go get covered) and locks to keep it safe, but sometimes crap still happens.
But our intangibles, those we are lousy at taking care of. How many of you have life insurance? What about disability insurance? And what about your intellectual property which is mostly intangible these days (digital)? Are you protecting that?
We can re-purchase all our stuff, but we can’t re-buy our lives or our art.