Today's Angst        

Much of today’s angst lies in a person’s aim, not to make his house a home, but in spending his time, money, dedication, and energy in trying to second-guess what “the next owner” will like. One’s environment should reflect his personality; it should be a place that he finds cozy, comfortable, and welcoming; his haven from the cruel, impersonal world outside. We all know that, instinctively, as well as from experience, but too much of society today has become instead geared toward treating one’s abode as nothing more than “where one hangs one’s hat at the moment”: yet another way in which our ever-increasingly mobile society does disservice to the individual. If a person cannot feel comforted in his own home, then he feels comforted nowhere.

So many people whom I’ve known have put so much effort into styling a house that might please “the mob,” all in the hopes of fetching a greater price when it is inevitably sold. But how cold a dwelling that creates for them meanwhile. It also often backfires, as in the case of one friend who meticulously did exactly that, only to hear the buyer say that he offered a much lower price because he disliked so much of what had been done, and that he would have to change so many specifics. The previous owner had forgotten one basic fact: people are individuals, not just fragments of a mob.

I’ve lived in the same home all of my life. My father built it with his own multitalented hands. It’s not for sale at any price. (And even if it were, I would devote my efforts to the place where I was going, not the place that I was leaving). It, and the possessions, décor, and colors within it, are as comforting as a favorite quilt wrapped around me on a winter’s night: a refuge and a defense against all of the misery “out there.” This is why I invariably bristle whenever people refer to possessions being “mere” things. It has been the things that are constants in my life. Individual people die, abandon, or betray, but my consoling things remain, and keep me sane during my resultant grief.