Pick it off the shelf.
Cart it to your home, or to your office, or let someone else handle the delivery if you can.
Unbox it.
Lay the pieces out.
Assemble your tools.
Read the instructions. Carefully or carelessly – it doesn’t seem to help all that much.
Sweat. Curse. Stop.
Recharge.
When you’re ready, return again, renewed in your desire to get the job done.
And when you tighten the last screw, hammer in the last nail, or attach the final piece of the project, you stand back… and look at what lies before you.
What did it take?
Hours of your time. Whatever it cost to procure it in the first place. The goodwill of whoever you roped into helping you with the task – holding the tools, and keeping your spirits up when you got demotivated.
In taking these things, what did it become?
Something more than a humble pile of wood, metal and plastic.
It’s a kind of alchemy. Rather than working to turn common elements into precious gold, you turn common items into something you
Something happens during that stretch of time where it’s you & your wits against the challenge before you.
An everyday object becomes something you see – in some small way – as an extension of yourself.
There’s a name for this. In psychology, they call it “The Endowment Effect”.
When it’s theirs, we simply see it as it is. But when it’s ours, it becomes more than the sum of its parts.
It becomes something that, by merit of our possession, grows in stature. Because we view it in a way that other people don’t. How could they? They haven’t been through what we’ve been through, and they haven’t seen what we’ve seen.
They say beauty is the eye of the beholder – that appeal is ultimately subjective, and what draws one person might repel another.
Likewise, value is in the hand of the holder.
So, what’s the lesson here?
Perhaps the message is that we overvalue the things we hold dear. And, in order to approach the world more rationally, we need to correct for this bias by keeping things at arm’s length.
That’s one interpretation. But there are others.
For instance:
If we value something greater simply because it’s in our possession, maybe the bigger takeaway is that we should focus less on on what we have… and be more concerned with seeing the beauty, value, and meaning in what’s right in front of us. Whatever form that takes.
And just as our grasp on something imbues it with substance that only we can see… we should remember that the same is true for every person we encounter, too.
In this light, a final thought:
Perhaps the difference between boredom and beauty is little more than proximity.