“Is this place still free?”, asked me a German woman while holding her black luggage and orange backpack. After I helped her with her bags, what could have evolved into an entertaining conversation was abruptly killed by my loud mind.
Questions such as “mine?”, “What does the idea of private property has to do with seats in the train?” and many more suddenly appeared, and they didn’t want to go away.
As any educated fellow, I talked for a few more minutes, always making my sentences shorter, so the conversation died and I turned my attention to my very selfish brain.
What called my attention is the fact that nothing is ours by default. We are born with nothing, and we take nothing to our afterlife (if there is one). During our days on Earth, we draw imaginary lines around everything we think belongs to us.
The fact is: they don’t. We might call this or that ours, but they are not. We attribute existence and meaning in a reflexive way. It starts from us and it comes back to us. There is no external regulator nor validation.
We are not the only creature that has a sense of possession. Most animals are similar to us in this way. Their instincts guide them towards survival and reproduction of the species. As a consequence, they protect their own food and their females. Try to take the food of a dog while its eating or try to enter the territory of wolves, and the sense of property becomes clear as daylight.
So the bottom-line is the same. But what makes us different? And is this “being different” something good? If not good, is it at least relevant?
The beauty of these questions is that they don’t have one single answer. The reader might have a completely different perspective from mine, and that’s ok. But I would like to present what comes to my mind.
It seems to me that property and possession are intrinsically related to meaning attribution. Since I acquire most of my possession moved by a desire, if there is no desire there is little ground for property acquisition.
We developed a system (very smart, by the way) that imprisoned us. By attributing meaning to our possessions, we create a vicious cycle. We want to acquire what has meaning for us, and we tend to attribute meaning to everything we hold. It can be a practical or a potential meaning. Just look at how many things we keep “just in case we need them”.
The whole point of this conversation is that this attribution process creates some sort of prison. We are bound to our possessions through abstract meaning that we ourselves created.
Once this process is established, it is very hard to step out of it. It becomes painful to get rid of our possessions. They hold meaning, and they hold the idea that we acquired them through our efforts. Throwing them away is throwing our efforts and part of our beliefs away.
But all of this becomes senseless once we identify the bottom-line of it. Once we notice that we are the ones that built the prison that surrounds us, we are one step closer to leaving it.
Possessions and property are two things that keep us moving. They keep us in the vicious process of labor and reward. They take our time and direct our efforts towards something less productive than our own minds.
Even though they are abstract and only relative, they have a very strong influence on our behavior.
But by breaking free from this mindset, we are finally able to dedicate our intrinsic resources to what really matters. Once we understand how the process works, we are able to take an active part on it.
Don’t get me wrong: I am not preaching a complete possessionless life. I am not preaching anything. I am just sharing. Sharing the different place and the different road that my wandering mind took while the train followed an already established one.
The Nemo Writer 