Changing my relationship with ‘stuff’

I’ve been back from a ten week stint in rural Kenya for well over a month now. One of the biggest culture shocks I experienced on my return home was just how much stuff there is. I was overwhelmed by the choice at the supermarket, and then I was overwhelmed at just how much stuff I owned. After living very basically, but happily for two and half months, I just didn’t understand why I needed all this stuff. I’d forgotten about the majority of it while I was away.

A starling discovery

Feature image credit: stephendl via flickr

Photo Credit: Duncan Brown (Cradlehall) via flickr

Some time ago, I was sitting in my living room with some of my family, enjoying the usual comfort of relaxing on the sofa. In one of the pauses between conversation, I glanced out the window in a sort of daydream when something caught my eye. My attention had been diverted by a bird sitting on my next door neighbour’s brick wall that surrounded our front garden. It was a beautiful bird with a speckled coat and feathers that revealed a multitude of colours when they caught the sunlight. I called over my brother-in-law, a fellow nature lover (or so we claimed), and asked him if knew what the bird was. After some failed guessing work, we turned to the RSPB’s online bird identifier and tried to remember the features of the little creature that had now flown off. Around half an hour later, using the process of elimination, one finally seemed to match. A starling. I raved about it to my parents, “I saw a starling outside earlier!” I started to see more. I told various others, “I saw some starlings the other day, they’re lovely!” until I repeated the same sentiment to my best friend. “Starlings?” “Yeah!” “Yeah I see them all the time, they’re quite common. Haven’t you seen them before?” Maybe I truly hadn’t (at least not on its own where I could distinguish it from its flock), or maybe leading up until that very moment, I had been seeing but not really looking. And to think I’d had the audacity to call myself a nature lover.