I drove my son to the water sports centre this evening and as we approached we could see there were a large group of visiting Orthodox Jews over from Israel enjoying a couple of hours of kayaking, rowing and messing about in the giant swan pedalos. They have visited before and quite honestly it’s comical. Aside from the slight strangeness of seeing fifty or sixty of them wandering about in their traditional dress they are more than chaotic through a combination of language difficulty and sheer eager enthusiasm. Told clearly to get into their boats and wait until the instructor joins them before paddling off they all nod and agree with vigour. As soon as they clamber into the brightly coloured kayaks they disappear off in all directions paddles flapping at angles as if their very lives depend on it. Later, as the sun drops down wearily behind the giant oaks it’s quiet again, just a single boat on the water gathering the disparate vessels from the lake and normality is restored, except that it isn’t because the experience has changed everyone, maybe imperceptibly, but we are changed nonetheless.
A theme I often find myself turning to like a trusted book leafed through so many times that the pages are not so much bent and folded but worn thinner, the print fainter, is that of the strategy we have tended to employ when we feel we are crumbling. Faced with the acute discomfort that something is wrong or missing we look longingly outside ourselves at what might fill the space. In the most damaging examples we might believe that we will find the solution in drink, drugs, gambling or some other similarly self destructive mechanism that serves only to worsen the problem. But even when we don’t fall into this trap we start moving, reorganising what we can see rather than concentrating on all that we can’t. It’s like a fire starting in your kitchen and you shutting the door and opening a window so that you can’t see the damage or feel the heat. Finding ourselves in this place we sometimes look for comfort in things, stuff, shiny objects, newness.
There is no doubt that we have become avaricious consumers over the past decades and that this particular social change has not had a noticeable impact on improving our feelings of wellbeing and happiness, probably the reverse is true. So why is that? What are we missing? It seems that we have become confused about the value of possession versus the preciousness of experience.
When I look back on all my years through the good and bad, the up and the down there are few possessions or purchases that force their way into the foreground and if they do it is because of the experience they were attached to. I don’t think of the time I purchased a particular guitar but I certainly remember a song I wrote with it, a time I played it in front of an audience of one or one hundred, or a session in which I used it to record something I had created. These memories are not just the ones that spike in my memory but they are those that actually created me, establish me as who I am today.
We think of ourselves as short of what we need to be if we don’t own this or have that but if we were able to accumulate everything we believe we want in our lives without any concern for the financial impact we would likely still be woefully short of what we need. If, on the other hand, we had to lose all of our experiences we would be nothing.
We are not our experiences, we are much more than that, but their great value is that they provide context within which we begin to understand our own existence. It is our experiences that we use to feel pain and joy, failure and success. It is experience that creates the map of our lives and the record of it too. It would be a lame photo album indeed that contained nothing but snaps of our stuff. We capture moments because they are not something we can physically touch, so we want to make a connection between a feeling and something physical so that we can feel it again and again and again. Only experiences can give us this, nothing physical we buy can ever do this.
What we buy is only new for a short time. It doesn’t take long for it to be superseded by something newer but our experiences are not like this. Whilst our possessions get older and lose their lustre our experiences grow in our memories and take on an ever more powerful role in the shaping of our history. I would go further and suggest that the money we spend is only ever invested well when it is connected to significant experience. A gift is a joy because of what it creates, not what it is, the wonderful food eaten at a beautiful restaurant is nothing without the context in which it is placed and a trip moves from mundane to magical because of all that it leaves you with rather than the physical locations in which you stand. All of these things are paid for but in and of themselves they are nothing.
The people in our lives are the alchemy, the catalyst which turn possession into experience. A new car is nothing without somewhere to go, a new dress or suit is much less without someone to show. Even in our solitude we are buying experiences rather than accumulating objects. If I buy a book to read alone in the evening when the darkness has fallen and the world is left outside I am still buying the experience of transporting myself from here to there wherever there may be. I am wiser if I don’t willingly spend money on accumulation but rather on stimulation.
Nothing that has shaped me is something I can touch. The fear I felt at the precarious distance of my parents marriage, the adrenalin surge of standing on a stage in front of people I didn’t know weighed down and at the same time rocket propelled by the expectation. The numbness I couldn’t feel as I heard the nurse tell me my mother was dead and the bewilderment that life seemed to be carrying on around me anyway. The absolute stillness of the Sunday when my father died and I sat with him on the sofa. He just looked as if he was asleep. I still often think he is just asleep but frequently feel a desperation that he would just wake up, just for a few minutes. The feeling of safety when self disclosure reached new proportions but my closest friends stood by and held the space, the electric surge in my chest that confirmed I really was in love, the heady joyous exhaustion and abject terror when my children were born and I was faced with responsibility the like of which I never experienced previously or since. The desperation that the laughter would stop when I could scarcely breathe at something so comical that it became a self generating loop of joy, layer upon layer of humour multiplying the strength every time I replayed the lines in my mind like a deeper and deeper trench of mirth from which it was impossible to find escape. The relief when I knew I could stop falling because someone would catch me, the terror that there was no end to the ever faster journey to the ground. The sheer excitement at a goal so sought that in my enthusiasm to celebrate I knocked the lens out of Martin’s glasses, the exuberance of youth and the certainty of impenetrability so strong that the morning after didn’t matter as long as the night before was lived to its fullest potential. A beautiful loaf emerging from the oven, a new chord discovered, a walk in the park taken aback by its gorgeousness despite its familiarity, the first feeling of autumn across my shaven head knowing that it’s time for a hat. There is no end to this list, no end. If I listed everything I own it would be finite and quickly completed, but more than that it would be as dull as the ache we feel when something bad has happened but, in those first few seconds after waking, we haven’t fully remembered its awfulness.
If you are short of anything in your life you cannot fill it in through things you can only do it through having experiences. They don’t need to be elaborate or expensive, they just need to be real. Meeting a friend, having a conversation, watching a film, sharing a meal or a coffee, walking, laughing, creating, thinking. All of these will change you and when things do not feel right it is change that we seek rather than some sort of misguided completion. We cannot be fulfilled by things which come from outside of us and the physical is, by definition outside. We become different, changed, more balanced when we work on what is inside and it is only experience that can alter us in this way.
Just this week I can’t think of anything physical which I have bought although I know I must have, but my experiences this week have been far too many to count. I only saw the group of Jews for a short time but they reminded me in the most wonderful way that there is a direct correlation between the vigour with which we approach our life and the joy and satisfaction we derive from it.
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