Second Entry - Things

It's been a while. Have wanted to write but didn't. Many things ... coming back home, starting training, starting to spin vinyl, the US election, Obama's triumph ... all were things I thought I should write a blog about but didn't.

Yesterday I found out that my flat in London was burgled and that I lost a vast collection of movies on DVD, music CDs, books and video games. I also had 3 (essentially brand new) games consoles as well as my stereo system stolen. A lot of stuff I collected over many years some of it with difficulty and all of it at great financial cost. A rough estimate of the cost of what I had stolen would be £2000 - £3000 but it could well be more. What bothers me even more is that a lot of those things had great emotional value to me as I had collected them for a reason.

I don't know if I am there yet, but I am trying to get beyond the point of being pissed off at what's happened. Trying to get philosophical about it, sort of. What, if anything, can I take away from this loss? As naive as it may sound, perhaps I should learn now something the idea of which I have always liked, but have always found it incredibly difficult to practice. I should learn not to attach so much value to material goods. Cliche as it sounds I should learn to 'store my riches in heaven' ... well at least in my heart. Keep the essence, keep the memory, keep the lesson inside me forever without needing to keep an assurance that the experience that provoked said emotions/thoughts can be kept forever (in the form of the material good that offered it in the first place). To put it simply ... do I need to keep physical copies of my favourite books, music, movies and games forever just so I feel I can read them, listen to them, watch them and play them all over again - even if in practice (mainly for lack of time) I may never do so? I'd like to get to where I don't. For too long now I felt that if I was buying books etc it wasn't materialism because the objects had a certain 'soul', they had a story to tell and an experience to share and offer. It wasn't as shallow as buying clothes, or furniture, or a car ... or was it?

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PS One of the things I will likely try to do on this blog, is share some music. I will try to start now with a song by a band from Minnessota which I used to really like and which I saw live twice at the Union Chapel in Islington, Low. After I found out what happened to my stuff I kept thinking of the title of their album "Things we lost in the fire". This is the first title on the album, called Sunflower. Hope this works.