Things

There are so many things in the world: houses, tables, dishes, lovingly-built model cars, electric vehicles, watercolor and pen sketches, boots, journals written in almost daily, hubcaps, mirrors, public artworks, tanks, surface-to-air missiles, socks and underwear, bathing suits, and on and on and on and on.

Probably most of what’s most admirable about human beings is the things that we’ve made, especially works of art and devotional structures like churches, synagogues, and sports stadiums.  But it’s all too much, isn’t it?  

Every tangible item that human beings have created, from a washer to washing machine or a pencil point to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, is the natural world converted to artifact.  All the wealth you see, whether riding your bike through the toniest neighborhood in your fair city or standing awestruck beneath that Sistine Chapel ceiling, is Mother Nature turned into money.

Remarkable to be sure, but it makes you want to just stop—and stop making anything ever again.

Another successful city dump run earlier this week, but that only scratches the surface of all that’s accumulated and doesn’t even begin to take on the hard choices like what to do with all the handmade stuff, the stuff that contains memories of your own and your loved one’s creative activities.  

Like what IS going be the fate of all those journals, birthday cards, and, for that matter, lovingly-built model cars?

If everyone stopped making things today, there would still be centuries of things remaining and while I seem to recall Elizabeth Kolbert writing that our entire civilization, in the strata of the geologic record, will, in hundreds of millions of years, be no thicker than a postage stamp, that’s still, in the next decade or two, on overwhelming amount of stuff to deal with and an even more daunting number of decisions to make.

So, I guess I’ll stick to the electronic written word: takes up no physical space and so easy to delete!