Me and Objects Versus Everyone Else

Last week, for her senior project, my friend Cambrie did a series of workshops to open people up to the concept of dialogue. I participated in three of the four, and was particularly interested by an exercise we did in the first of the workshops - bringing in and sharing an object that was significant to us. Of course, me being who I am (clear by being the author of this ridiculous blog), I was so amped. Deciding which object to bring was actually kind of hard because there are so many that mean so much to me as a part of my life. I settled on my most important one: my bike. Some of the other options included my helmet, my cell phone and my planner. The explanation that I have for my bike is that it the single most important object in my life, and the representation of so many things that I strongly value, including freedom, mobility, connection to my community and my environment, and taking a joy in life. When I explained this to the group, I also tacked on that my parents had purchased the bike for me as a graduation present and I was grateful to them for having done that.

What made my object and my explanation and understanding about it different was that nearly everyone else brought an object that was attached to a person or a story in a more significant way. There was a lot of jewelry, a fair number of photographs and a few other non-functional tokens of love, affection and stories together. People described the story related to that object, or the emotion that they felt when receiving the object or when they interact with it now. It was a lot about reminding oneself about past experiences.

I know that I interact with objects differently than other people, but it's not frequently that I am blatantly reminded of that. My interpretation of objects is that they are not equivalent or even (most of the time) tied to memories, experiences or relationships. Yes, I keep a lot of stuff, but most of it I keep for it's intrinsic value as opposed to the memory that it triggers. But, for me objects are only valuable as themselves. This kind of makes me concerned that some day when I start losing my memory (more than I already do for those of you who have unfortunately experienced my rough short-term memory recently) I may need those objects to evoke a memory, emotion or relationship for me, and I may simply not have them.

So, perhaps this puts me in a position where I'm not a great person to be conducting research about why people care about objects, and how they relate to them, since I don't have any grounding in their relationships with objects, rather just my strange and unusual relationship. Maybe it this is what makes me so fascinated with human interaction, though.