While I enjoy and treasure many of my material possessions, no, they do not run me. My first wife was aghast once when I said that I would chop up the Solid Oak Dining Room Set we had for firewood if we needed heat. Of course, it wouldn't be the first thing to go, but it would go, if necessary.
I'm buying my house and try to care for it and the furnishings in it. I recently got my first DVDD player, a reasonably cheap one, $150. I have a couple antique toys left over from my childhood and even though I've been offered some pretty good money for them, I keep them to give to my grandsons when they get older and can appreciate what they have.
In 1974, we came to Washington from Ft. Bragg N.C. for Christmas with the first wifes family. While gone, our house was burglarized and they took just about everything. Nothing was ever recovered. Stole all my tools I had before joining the Army, artifacts we brought back from Germany, a color console TV, all my stereo I got in Germany, all material possessions. Sometime during the next few weeks, as I was moping around worrying about what I had lost, it came to me that I still had what mattered most, my wife and daughters (of course, the wife and I didn't last). We were all healthy and no harm had come to any of us. The material didn't seem to matter all that much and I realized that we can lose our material possessons at any given moment. But, they can be replaced. Had it been one of my daughters I lost, or even the wife, at that time, I doubt I would have wanted to go on and who knows what could have happened.
Since then, I have tried to keep things in perspective as to what matters most to me and treasure them more.
Lew W
