Happiness Project Aug. 24, 2024 Saturday

It is a remarkably beautiful day of cool, low humidity, sunshine and I have taken the day off since all the chores are done and my dog has been walked. My pleasure of choice is a day of reading and I chose the newest DISCOVER magazine because it has a cover story about our closest animal friend: the dog, the cat, the horse. But in the article I want to discuss here, is a quote "In the late 1990's and early 2000's functional MRI technology uncovered what happens in the brain when we experience joy. The nucleus acccumbens (the pleasure center) lights up In the late 2000's the same technology also revealed the nucleus accumbens activates when we make a meaningful purchase." The article I was reading "Collecting Your Thoughts" page 44 discusses how collecting enhances memory, forges new connections in the brain, and triggers relaxation as well as the pleasure center. The article goes on to describe the difference between random item hoarding, purposeless and leading to lack of self-esteem, and collecting with purpose, goal, discernment.

I have a lot of small collections: postcards, books, ceramic teapots and cups shaped like little houses, and little wooden houses. I have a scattering of small tins, and an assortment of strange single objects that simply touched me, like a tintype photograph, a perfectly spherical river rock, some fossils, several kinds of World's Fair memorabilia. I also have a scattering of old old school supplies, a very old pencil box, and I used to have a collection of golden rule rulers which disappeared somehow. They did give me pleasure, when I found them and when I looked at them and it gives me pleasure to still have them in the glass fronted curio cabinet in my living room.

A few yars back a couple of women authors, Marie Kondo, and a Swedish woman wrote books about clearing out. One was called Swedish Death Cleaning, about getting rid of all your stuff before you die. I immediate took umbrage at the thought - I like my stuff, lots of things have connections to memories, like that spherical rock from a creek in Plattsburgh, New York where I hiked with a man I was once married to and in love with and his best friend, now deceased. That rock, even just the thought of it, conjures the sound of the rushing water and the whisper of the trees and the smell of the woods, not to mention the memory of being in love and being young with those two young, strong,lithe men, one now old and one dead.

On a practical basis, collections become museums and keep a record of our material culture and history. One of my favorite museums is the Museum of American History in West Deptford (Andoloro Way, Westville) in a farm house, the collection of a lifetime of the proprietor and his family: fishing reels, fossils, electric trains, farm implements, green glass telephone pole insulators, and Christmas train platform figures made from melted down bullet casings in Germany after World War II, my favorite items in his vast collection!

Today the pleasure center of my brain was alight with the joy of reading this much aticipated magazine and having the afternoon off to read, and finding support for my natural inclination to collect objects of interest and delight. I am glad to know that science backs me up!

On Monday, I am going to lunch with the great-neice and we are going to Rancocas Woods, Creek Road where there is a collection of antique shops that I love to visit. The fragrance of the burning scented candles and the hand-made soaps enhances the oy I experience in visiting again with objects I remember from my personal past, for example a pair of book ends made from old crank pencil sharpeners, from the days before electric sharpeners. Happy trails collectors! wrightj45@yahoo.com