I recently posted the following post on my personal Facebook page. I was surprised at the number of comments I received, so I decided I needed to share it as a blog post mainly so it wouldn’t be lost in Facebook oblivion.
Today is December 7th. For many Americans, today is a time of remembering the bombing of Pearl Harbor. For me, it’s a mark of a personal tragedy and a great lesson. On this day when I was 18 years old, my childhood home burned down. It was a beautiful victorian house built in the 1890s, with loads of memories and pretty much irreplaceable.
I was away at college, my first semester, the night before my first college final exams. Suddenly, everything was a blur and I had no ‘home’ to go home to for the holidays. Friends rallied around and offered support. My mom and my two young sisters moved in with the man she was dating, but there was really no room for me in their small apartment. I stayed with friends. I watched as the community went out of their way to give what they could to support us in that time of need. It was hard to receive.
We were fortunate and very grateful that no one was hurt in the fire, but we lost every THING in the house. It taught me that THINGS are transitory. It taught me to not get too attached to objects in my life. Don’t get me wrong. There are things I absolutely love and I would be sad to lose, but my overall feeling is that things are just tools to make my life better and more enjoyable. Sometimes, I feel over burdened by too many things in my life. They do have the tendency to need some attention and care, attention and care that I would rather spend on the people in my life.
There is a certain freedom in my approach to things. When my father died, I had to clean out his apartment and storage unit. He had accumulated a LOT of stuff over the years and he had kept a lot of his mother’s stuff too. I was grateful I didn’t have a lot of sentimental attachment to all that stuff and I was able to give away or discard most of it. It also came in handy after my divorce. As I let go of each item that no longer served me, I could feel the weight lift. I felt lighter, more free, more joyful.
All these years after that fire, I celebrate the lesson of non-attachment I learned at a young age. I celebrate the generosity of people to help one another when times are hard. I celebrate being able to receive that generosity. I celebrate the lesson of knowing that the people in my life are the most precious part of my life. I cherish them all, each and every day, especially on this particular day when I’m reminded of how quickly life can change.
I want to clarify one thing. This is a story about the loss of material things. Even though I felt like there was a physical loss of my home, I always felt I had a home with my family. I knew then that home is where I am. It is not a location or even who I am with that makes a home. It is within myself.
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