What would you do if you lost all your possessions?

When it comes to possessions, I am somewhat of a bower bird. The amount of material I built up over decades and more of professional engagement in schools has given me an abundance of material.

When I was going to retire in 2012, saving documentation and other things I have built up over the years was a key assignment.

I have an office under our elevated house and had it custom-built to house material going back as far as the mid-1960s.

I have a lot of documents technologically stored and material in paper form. This extensive collection of data has been saved online and on my computer, iPad and so on.

At times I think when other people are unfortunate enough to lose their possessions or natural or man-made catastrophe, “I wonder how I would feel if these losses were happening to me“.

I’m invariably grateful for the fact that over the years losses of possessions have been pretty minor.

however, if I were to lose all my possessions, I still have a great deal of material in the repository of my mind. Fortunately, I have been blessed with the ability to recall a great deal of the experiences that have been part of my life.

I’m often thankful for the fact that my memory has been so good and that I remember things. I don’t have a crystal memory but it’s pretty adequate.

Should at some stage I become a person afflicted with Alzheimer’s or dementia, possessions of the past stored in my memory would gradually fade. I guess if that was the case, I wouldn’t remember what I had, so the loss would be less and less noticed.

But I’ve often thought that if I get to the point where the repository of my mind is no longer as it is today, that is to say, if I was declared to have these memory losses, I would like to arrange to end my life before I became hopeless and dependent upon others.