Things given

I've recently bought a house (Yay! Finally!) and I'm in the process of moving all of my many, many, many belongings into the darn thing. It turns out I have a lot of stuff. Some of it isn't even mine.

Actually, quite a lot of it isn't mine. It turns out that my family has been waiting for this opportunity for years, and have been holding on to various things with the ultimate goal of "one day giving it to Sharon".

This is nice... I guess. Only it means that I'm stuck with a slight dilemma: What do you do when you have something that is perfectly good, does exactly what you need it to do, and was given to you by someone you love and respect... but isn't what you want?

Many years ago, when I was a child, my mother and grandmother collected a dinner set for me. It was a promotional thing by some grocery store, and shopping trip by shopping trip they collected an entire 8 piece set of plates, saucers, cups and the like. It's an okay set. The bowls are too small for cereal, but okay for dessert. That's really my only legitimate complaint.

Only it's really boring. If you had put me in a room of place settings and said "pick one you like", I probably wouldn't even notice this set was in the room.

What I would do, given the choice, would be to run around the room and pick six or eight different patterns (with actual patterns) and get a complete single setting in each (dinner plate, bread-and-butter, saucer, bowl, teacup...). Then I'd keep myself amused for months by flitting between the different patterns every time I ate something.

I'd like a whole bunch of different interesting patters. Like this one I saw in a shop a few weeks ago:

You may notice it's not white.

Personally, white plates aren't my cup of tea - they're not what I'd choose for myself. But now I have a perfectly good white dinner set (a whole 8 settings' worth) that was lovingly collected for me (by two people whom I love and admire), and diligently kept aside for me for decades. Literally, decades. There's a lot of love in those boring plates.

My mother also decided to celebrate the purchase of my new house by buying me a new cutlery set, meaning the set I've had in storage for years (and was kind of hoping to use one day) is now redundant.

I feel ungrateful and churlish for complaining about these things. I have something that I need, that I didn't even have to pay for. There's nothing wrong with any of it. Heck, the cutlery set is better than the one I brought back with me from Tasmania.

It's just not really "mine", you know?

Buddhist philosophy would say my problem is wanting stuff. If I didn't want something with a pattern (or a bunch of patterns, as the case may be), then I would realise that I have everything I need and much more besides. And then I would look at my plates and utensils and realise that it's foolish to think anything could ever really be "mine" anyway. Solomon would probably agree with that.

But still... I want the pretty plates. But I don't need any plates. Aren't I lucky to have such pointless problems?

As for the stuff my uncle has been keeping for me, well that's a whole 'nother post.