Ownership

This word troubles me in so many ways.

The most frivolous objection I have relates to its most abused meaning in the land of management speak. In boardrooms, meetingrooms and videoconferences across the English-speaking globe, "ownership" is assigned to ideas, projects, portfolios...the dull list stretches on towards tedious infinity.

But the harder one to grapple is about consumerism.

Jane lives in a big house with young, glamorous, and I suspect fairly well-off, parents. The walls are white, the skirting boards are glossy, and the carpet is unexpectedly deep and luscious underneath my feet. I'm eight or nine years old, a shy child but not old enough that my young enthusiasm has been permanently beaten down by shyness, and I'm over for a play date.

Jane leads me to a bookshelf ... I'm placing it in a corridor, or a dining room - some unexpected space where white bookshelves recess quietly into the wall. There I find Dr Seuss books. Not just some Dr Seuss books - but all the Dr Seuss books. All the ones that I look for hopefully in the weekly trip to the library. It's such a rush of untold wealth that I have no idea how to react apart from an embarrassed reluctance to let any signs of my awestruckness slip. I let my eye gloss over the titles, catch one I have not yet sampled (Green eggs and ham - the library copy always on loan) and gingerly pull it (unstained, unbent) from its neighbours. Jane's happy to let me read it on that soft carpet, but her pride comes from ownership and it is most definitely Not. For. Loan.

I was brought up in an environment unbalanced by having and not having...parents from the upper middle class who had forged their own financial path independent of their own parents, with resulting times of real need and frugality. The values I learned were that of modesty, making do, using till it's broke, and realising the richness of life that can be found in shared wealth such as libraries, parks, wilderness. In 2010 the landscape has changed so much - now public parks are overrun by personal trainers, libraries are obsolete as children stay home to play computer games or watch DVDs that their family owns, and wilderness becomes an uncomfortable space where most signs of your success (the things you own) are missing and there's only YOU.

I don't know where this post is leading...except to remind myself that everything passes, that ownership does not define me, and that the relationships I have are more important than any material thing I could desire.