2.3 "Without Vision There is No Stuff and Things" 

I was a migrant to London Ontario from Quebec. I constantly cased the city looking for deep arts and culture experiences. One rainy Thursday night I spotted a poster downtown. Poopy Dan and His Lunch were playing at the Change of Pace. The event poster was entitled "Without Vision There is no Stuff and Things." The title was a dis-hommage to a proverb of Solomon. Today it still makes me think about my stuff and things.

 

I like my stuff. I like it because it is mine. It is mine because I like it. I want other people to like it, but I don’t want it to be their stuff. I want it to be my stuff. 

I like sharing, but I prefer to choose which stuff I share. Steven Wright said he has a seashell collection, and that maybe you have seen it. He keeps it scattered all over the beaches across the world. That is one way of sharing your stuff. I saw an internet meme that went something like this: a man said his wife told him that she thought all of the men in the world only had one brain and that they shared it. He said to himself, that he wanted to make a sharp and witty comeback to her but it wasn't his turn to have the brain. It is hard to share your house and your stuff, and harder to learn how to hold it loosely. 

How do we challenge ourselves to change?

One summer we stayed on a First Nations Reserve. There were no houses to live in so we pitched our tents in the classrooms of the school. We had some cheese we kept in the fridge. It disappeared. It was a communal refrigerator and therefore it was communal cheese. One day some kids were playing on the roof of that school. It was a very high roof. I told them they should get down. They said,

 “This isn’t your school.”

I own a flying boat. It's part of my stuff. Originally I gave it to my father out of guilt. When my brother and I were kids, he used to hang his favourite model of a Canso Flying Boat (PBY Catalina) from the ceiling in the bedroom that we shared. At bedtime, we would ask him to spin it around. Somehow we wrecked it. I gave him a solid metal one 50 years later to replace it (pictured above). He flew in the Flying Boats in the eastern Pacific Ocean during WWII. I think I was inspired by growing up in a home where I thought that boats could fly.

 

Joshua, the rabbi, would do torah for his students. He said, don't store your treasures on earth where they can rust and decay, store them in a different sanctuary. He has a collection of lilies he keeps scattered all over the fields of the world. Maybe you have seen them.