What would you do if you lost all your possessions?
Define possessions. Are they only the tangible things—house, furniture, books, clothes, savings—or do they include the less visible world I’ve built since 1999: tens of thousands of photographs and videos online, millions of words, projects, and blog posts that together form a kind of digital self? Are those not artefacts too, just composed of pixels rather than paper and wood?
If everything vanished—analogue and digital alike—I imagine the first feeling would be shock, quickly followed by a strange lightness. Once the loss is absolute, the clutter, both physical and mental, disappears too. What remains is the essence of being alive: health, family, curiosity, the work I love, the impulse to create.
I like to think I’d meet it stoically, counting my blessings rather than my losses. I’ve started again before. Each new beginning has its own rhythm, a quiet sense of editing—life pared down to its essentials.
Losing volumes of diaries would be upsetting. I’m just at the start of putting these I online ‘Fifty Years On’, a project that should occupy me for around 16 years.
I’d be annoyed to lose my digital archive. It’s not the data itself but the layered continuity: years of thought and observation that remind me who I’ve been becoming. Perhaps possessions, in any form, are simply extensions of memory. And if they vanish, the task becomes to remember differently—to rebuild from what’s carried inside rather than what’s stored outside.
A clearing, then. A reset. The beginning of another story.
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