One of my bikes was stolen. I am truly disheartened. But as I deal with the logistics and emotions of the situation, I want to offer something constructive.
A few lessons emerge:
An item being stolen feels like a violation.
Sometimes we create relationships with objects.
When you don’t have many things, the few things you have are quite important.
Often, items we own came with or relate to other auxiliary items.
While the end result of something being stolen is the same as it being broken, lost, etc., it comes with the added feeling of violation. Part of this is because it is a violation; you were deeply disrespected by another individual and a law was broken. The other part is related to the strong feeling of ownership that tends to overlap with who we are as a person. Our things are an extension of us. So it’s as if, in a minor but palpable way, I feel like a part of myself was taken.
I had a relationship with this bike. There are things I added that personalized it, it’s a particular mode of transportation I’m suddenly without, and it holds meaningful memories (including that it was my first bike as an adult). I depended on it’s pedals to move the wheels to move me forward. There’s a certain amount of trust I imbued into my bike, feeling reassured that it’d take me from point A to B, and back. Like some furniture, it held me, so there is a relationship to my body.
Putting so little weight onto objects allows me a relaxed perspective on ownership. So this situation was jarring. How can I suddenly care so much about a thing? How can my emotional state be rocked by this action? It helps to understand the violation aspect and the relationship I created with this particular object.
I can easily jump to gratitude: how lucky I am that I can afford the loss and my lifestyle is not severely impacted. I can jump to the logic and logistics. I can easily tell myself it doesn’t matter, because it’s just a thing, and reframe the experience. But part of mindfulness and minimalism is to not only accept such realities, but to accept the feelings that come with them. While I don’t spend much time thinking or “feeling” about my stuff due to how little I have and how I value it, mindfulness and minimalism don’t require me to be emotionless about the special and highly functional items I have.
It felt ceremonial to poke around my home in sadness, collecting my bike’s auxiliary items: the instruction manual, the two spare tubes, the hardware that came with the basket I’d attached to the back, and the “tube top” that allowed me secure my bike to my car. These items lived in three different places based on use case. These were things for a thing in different things, which can present a common organizing challenge if you don’t keep track of or label your stuff.
This reminds me of a client who had re-homed his dog. I was helping him organize and discovered various items to support the dog which he hadn’t had for over a month: food, toys, blankets, pills, etc. These items lived in different places. Keeping them post re-homing acted as a constant reminder of the dog he had to say good-bye to. They were taking up space. They were also a task; something that would take some time and thought to address. Some items needed to be thrown away while others could be donated to a shelter. The process of sorting through them was emotional. But delaying the emotional component of letting go, allows it to linger with these related items.
I come across auxiliary items when working with clients often. They’ll have manuals, pieces of technology, hardware parts, or other attachments for things that they no longer own. Or they’re unsure what the parts belong to and want to keep them in case they remember, find the item, or “maybe it can be used in some other way sometime.” [Side note: labeling all “pieces” that come with an item is key. A detailed label is always worth it; our memories are much worse than we except them to be]. Even if the items don’t hold an emotional weight, they create an overabundance of stuff and the conundrum of whether to keep them when rediscovered.
Sometimes an unwelcome shift can serve as a reminder of basic truths. And the benefits associated with this reminder, despite the method in which it was delivered, is important to recognize. Mindfully acknowledge and eventually contextualize the emotions that come with it. I hope my experience not only provides framing for any items you’ve had stolen but is a productive reminder of the “things for a thing in various things” that you can now explore in your home.