A few days ago I was having a discussion with my “other half” about “the meaning of life.”  He claimed that if anything were to happen to his motorcycle and his truck, he would feel that his life was totally ruined forever.  I asked him what those two objects really meant to him and his reply was “they are my life.”  I could not believe how serious he was!  (I guess that means I am in third place, or lower!)

Now, I can understand LIKING a material object a whole lot, and even becoming sentimentally attached to some (like something that has been passed down for generations) but I can’t understand feeling that material objects like motorcycles and trucks actually define your life to the point that if something happened to them that you would be so emotionally devastated that you felt your life was ruined forever!  I mean, what is up with that? 

What kind of legacy does that leave?

When a person is dead and gone, are the material objects you leave behind going to grieve your passing?  Are they going to put flowers on your grave?  Are they going to tell their children what a great person you were?  Are they going to share stories about what fun they had at DisneyWorld with you?  I don’t think so!  (All right, your big John Deere Tractor with backhoe will fondly remember all the great graves you dug up in New England together!  And the Harley Davidson will miss the wide open road it shared with you.  Big whoop!  Who will they tell about it?) 

Someone once told me that no one is truly completely dead until no one remembers them anymore.  People stay alive in the memories of other people!  So in order to do that, we must foster our relationships with other people, not objects!

Although I understand being sentimentally attached to some objects, I think I define MY life more in terms of the love and friendship and memories of the living creatures around me, not the inanimate ones that just sit idly by and watch and wait and rust away.