"If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."

--Wayne Dyer

I've always been attached to "things."  

Wheeeeewww...that felt good to admit. 

But not in an envious, stingy, greedy way. Keep reading. 

I think it began when I was four and I learned through a string of deaths in my family that nothing lasts.  No one lasts.  My best armchair psychologist explanation is that over the years growing up, I began to place too much importance on things, hoping they would last and that the people the things reminded me of would last.  Or live.  Or stay.  Andy Stanley would argue that my love of things is rooted in envy--the idea being that I feel like I owe myself things.  Who knows...(Shoulder shrug).  

Things have a way of making you feel special.  Remember when you got your first car?  Remember when you got your first NEW car??  Or maybe--because I'm a musician--when you got your first instrument?  Remember when you got your class ring?  Or your diploma?  Remember when you got your first house?  Remember when you got your first paycheck?  Remember when you got your first spouse?  Remember when you got your first really nice pair of shoes?  Or jacket?  Or cell phone?  Or computer? 

Remember how special you treated it? How you protected it? Perhaps to the point of it being too much?? 

My first car is probably in a scrap pile somewhere.  I've never owned a new car.  My first instrument MIGHT be in my mom's attic??  My class ring?  I never wear it.  It's not even real gold, and the stone is fake.  My diploma?  I don't know where it is.  My first house is now owned by a student of mine.  My first paycheck?  Spent.  My marriage ended.  My first nice pair of shoes?? Am I kidding myself right now??? My first cell phone? It was in a bag and got stolen out of my car in the AHS stadium parking lot.  My first computer?  Thrown away years ago.  The damn thing only has 64MB of RAM and had a 128 MB hard drive.  

Though those things all have gone by the wayside, the memories attached to them haven't.  And I think it is in this desire to preserve things, or moments, or people, that we begin to place too much value in things.  

They basically become idols.  

Today, I was out riding my motorcycle.  Somehow, this whole concept entered my mind, and I've been stuck on it since.  

I think we hold on the past because it's really the only thing we have. It's all we can look to and say "that was real. That happened!" And that's why we take photos. And put up statues of people. And leave Christmas trees up til August. Hey...I'm definitely gonna the first to have his tree up this year, for sure! 

But anyway.

Things are so often labeled idols and maybe they are. But to me they are reminders. They remind me that,  in a world where EVERY. SINGLE. THING. seems to change at the speed of light, there are some things that last. That stay. That live. Forever. 

And those are our memories.