Trash or Treasure? The Nomadic Life of Possessions

A bearded man holding a sign that reads, "Seeking Human Kindness."

Recently, as I was walking through my neighborhood, I came across an abandoned shopping cart. Its contents—scattered in quiet disarray—seemed to carry the traces of someone’s life. And strangely, I felt that these possessions belonged less to the person who had been using the cart and more to the cart itself. The cart, in its humble, wheeled way, was the home; the person merely its temporary inhabitant.

Think about it: a house is more than a shelter. It holds the things we need to feel at home in the world. The little objects we accumulate, the odds and ends that make life manageable, quietly define the spaces we inhabit. Move them into a new place and you immediately feel the loss—the couch feels awkward, the lamp seems lonely, the small comforts that once fit perfectly now feel alien. The furniture, the possessions, the accumulated minutiae—they are what allow the inhabitant to inhabit, to make a home. And I think the same was happening with this cart. Its contents were less about ownership and more about establishing a dwelling, a way of being at home in the world.

Seeing the cart abandoned was strange. Almost like stumbling onto a crime scene, it carried that tension of something intensely private made public. Messy, disorderly, chaotic. It would take effort to restore, and even then, where would the cart go once all its contents were gathered again?

I couldn’t help but wonder about the circumstances that led to it. Had there been an emergency, the owner whisked away suddenly? A revelation, a moment of clarity, in which they realized that the things they thought were important were in fact dragging them down? Or perhaps theft, with anything valuable taken and the rest left behind to languish? Whatever the cause, the result was the same: without the human presence to maintain it, the possessions lost their vitality, their meaning. They became trash. Litter. Things stripped of purpose, waiting for someone to make sense of them again.

I can hear you protesting, your sentimentality bristling: “It’s not trash! These are someone’s worldly possessions. Treat them with the same dignity as the furniture in a house!” And perhaps you are right. Yet a house, no matter how messy, remains stationary. It blends into the neighborhood, obeying the unspoken rhythms of community. The cart, however, moves. It wanders. Its presence disrupts harmony. And the question emerges: can we truly assign the same value to something that is untethered, that exists nomadically, outside the structures we have built to measure worth?

A garden may be weeded for beauty or productivity, yet that does not diminish the intrinsic value of the removed plants. Their removal is not a reflection on their virtue, but a reflection on their dissonance within the composition. In the same way, the cart’s contents were not inherently worthless—they simply no longer fit into the narrative or space they occupied. Still, they couldn't just be left there. They had to be picked up, collected, and then... What? Brought to the land fill? Stored like a lost and found table at an elementary school?

So, honestly, what do we do with all of this stuff?

And what of our own accumulation—the objects, the belongings, the symbols of comfort and necessity—that fill our houses, our closets, our garages? How much of it truly serves us, and how much merely allows us to exist in the world with some sense of belonging? And what do we care when we inevitbaly abandon it in our passing.

And so the abandoned cart lingers in my memory, a small monument to the ways we try to make a home in the world. Its scattered contents remind me that our possessions, however carefully arranged, are temporary scaffolding for a life we inhabit only for a moment. They carry meaning only when we give it, yet they quietly shape us in turn, teaching us about attachment, absence, and the fragile boundaries between necessity and desire.

Perhaps the lesson is not in the things themselves, but in the care we bring to them, and in the recognition that home—true home—is less about what we hold onto and more about how we carry ourselves through the world. The cart may sit empty now, but in its abandonment, it quietly speaks of presence, absence and the sublte art of dwelling, wherever life happens to leave us.

Rich or poor we are all layed low in death. And whether we've a shopping cart or a house full of possessions left behind, what will remain is our relationship not to those posessions but to the people who pick them up an carry on.

- Shawn

esence, absence, and the subtle art of dwelling, wherever life happens to leave us.