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I Still Have the Bear

On the one object I have moved into six flats and have never once considered throwing away.

{'key': 'nora', 'masthead': 'Nora Bennet', 'tagline': 'Documenting my days', 'author': 'Nora Bennet', 'advertiser': 'Hailey Lane', 'disclosure': 'Paid partnership with Hailey Lane · Nora Bennet is a fictional columnist and her photographs are AI-generated', 'cta': 'See the five on haileylane.com', 'logo': 'nora-logo.png', 'avatar': 'img/nora-portrait.jpg'} · March 2019 · 4 min read · 0 picks · haileylane.com

I have thrown away furniture, photographs, letters and an entire relationship's worth of things. I have never come close to throwing away a small brown bear with one ear that sits slightly wrong.

It is not about the bear

I am not sentimental about objects generally. I am ruthless in a way people find slightly unsettling. I have binned things other people would have kept and felt nothing.

But the bear has been in six flats. It has been in a box in a loft for two years and it came out of the box and went straight back on a shelf without any discussion.

What I think is actually going on

I think the difference is that it was held. Almost everything else I have owned was looked at, or used, or lived in, but very few things get held, and the ones that do end up carrying something the others do not.

Which is probably why soft things get kept and hard things get replaced, and why nobody has ever moved house four times with a lamp.

The unhelpful conclusion

You cannot decide in advance which object this will be for someone. I am fairly sure whoever gave me the bear had no idea, and would be quite surprised.

You can only really increase the odds by giving people something soft enough to be held, and then getting out of the way.

['It is on the shelf above the desk. It has been there through all of this.']
Nora