Why I stopped collecting things and started collecting silences

For most of my adult life I collected things. Books, mainly — but also records, notebooks, certain kinds of light fittings, and an embarrassing number of mechanical pencils. Each object felt like a small anchor. Evidence that I had taste, that I had been somewhere, that I existed in a particular and specific way.

Then I moved, and had to carry everything I owned down four flights of stairs, and something shifted.

The weight of objects

I am not going to make the argument that possessions are meaningless. That argument is usually made by people who have already inherited enough. Objects carry memory. A well-made thing is a pleasure to use. I still believe all of this.

What I stopped believing in was accumulation as a practice in itself — the sense that another acquisition would complete something that had not yet been completed by all the previous acquisitions.

I began, instead, to pay attention to silence.

What silence is

Not the absence of noise — that barely exists outside of isolation tanks and the very early morning. Silence, I mean, in the sense of unscheduled time. Time with no object. The twenty minutes between waking and reaching for anything. The walk taken without headphones. The meal eaten without reading.

These silences are harder to keep than any object. They require constant re-choosing. But they accumulate differently — not as weight, but as a kind of spaciousness. Room for something to arrive, if it wants to.

I cannot tell you what arrives. That is the point.