Cost of Ownership

I’ve always found it irritating to share “my possessions” with others.  OK, after we got married I grudgingly made it “our possessions.”  My attitude has always been that it’s our car and only we drive it. It’s our holiday home and only occupied when we are present.  And for good reason too.  Many times did I get the terrible urge to help somebody else and allowed him or her to borrow something from us.  If it ever got back chances were that it would be scratched or even broken!

My attitude only started to change some 5 years ago when I started to realise what the cost is of exclusive ownership.  That holiday home.  Built in our minds with loving passion to our precise specifications.  Only problem is that the artisan didn’t deliver it to specifications.  Even after the third attempt.  When he knew we would be so exasperated that we would pay him to leave and never come back.  And the sloppy workmanship has been costing us time and money ever since.  But at least it’s our holiday home!

Subsequently we bought a chalet in Austria.  This time our brave attitude was that it will be rented out for as many weeks as possible occupied by up to 12 adults every week.  The truth is that this was the only way we could afford this chalet.  Renting it out would pay it off in 10 to 15 years time.  We can then occupy it permanently or still rent it out and earn a passive income.

The fist time we visited the chalet was 8 months after it was rented out for the first time. I determinedly looked for evidence of abuse of “our possession.”  (Frankly the bank has much more of a claim to it than we have.) I struggled to get a list together of six minor items that needed attention! Granted the artisans in that part of the world are in another class. But we realised that in this case our cost of ownership was minimal.  We only had to personalise it by hanging a few pictures.

This concept is becoming more general. It is often called Lock-up-and-Go.  Something residents of the Diaspora should consider. When you drive through resort towns anywhere in the world during an off peak holiday season, you notice how many palatial holiday properties are standing empty. And there must be thousands standing empty all over the world. All those boats and yachts! From our apartment window we can see five smaller yachts berthed at the quay of the local Sailing Club. None of these yachts left their mooring places more than 10 times this summer. Some never even once!

Our change of mindset is ongoing. Our lifestyle is nomadic. Why can’t we earn a rental income from our houses when we are not occupying it? Why can’t our possessions be generic for other to use?  Ok, we do own some very old furniture that came down through our families, but would paying guests really destroy it?

Ah, but some things you’ve got to own outright!  For example our 4x4 with all its safari equipment.  Truth is that we use it for true 4x4 trips probably once every two years.  And on our trip in 2003 to the Okavango Delta our Dutch friends rented a vehicle that was better fitted out than ours! 

I find the writings of C.S. Lewis so thought-provoking.  Not always easy to understand, but often life changing. One is tempted to argue that his writings are about 50 years old and therefore not applicable anymore, but in reality they are timeless although the English in use at the time sometimes sound a bit strange. If you don’t know who C.S. Lewis was, here’s a short background:

C.S. Lewis was a Fellow and Tutor at Oxford University and later became Professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University. He wrote many books.  He was gifted with a brilliant and logical mind.  If you have not yet read one of his books, you might have seen the film “Shadowlands”, starring Anthony Hopkins, which portrayed an episode in his life.

C.S. Lewis was an atheist who spent considerable energy to disprove Christianity by logical reasoning.  The longer he reasoned the more he proved the case for Christianity.  He converted to Christianity and called himself “perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” Fifty years ago he wrote his most popular non-fiction book “Mere Christianity.” In this book he argues the case for Christianity with his starting point the atheist’s arguments.  I found it fascinating.

I recently re-read his the screwtape letters published by HarperCollins Publishers.  It was first published in 1942. I’ve got to share an extract with you.

Screwtape is an experienced devil. His nephew Wormwood is just at the start of his demonic career.  In The Screwtape letters Screwtape teaches his nephew the subtler nuances in the art of tempting and misleading.  Reference to Our Father is of course Satan, and the Enemy is God. This is what he teaches on ownership in letter number twenty-one!

The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged. The humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in Heaven and in Hell and we must keep them doing so. Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men’s belief that they ‘own’ their bodies — those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another! It is as if a royal child whom his father has placed, for love’s sake, in titular command of some great province, under the real rule of wise counsellors, should come to fancy he really owns the cities, the forests, and the corn, in the same way as he owns the bricks on the nursery floor.

We produce this sense of ownership not only by pride but by confusion. We teach them not to notice the different senses of the possessive pronoun — the finely graded differences that run from ‘my boots’ through ‘my dog’, ‘my servant’, ‘my wife’, ‘my father’, ‘my master’ and ‘my country’, to ‘my God’. They can be taught to reduce all these senses to that of ‘my boots’, the ‘my’ of ownership. Even in the nursery a child can be taught to mean by ‘my teddy bear’ not the old imagined recipient of affection to whom it stands in a special relation (for that is what the Enemy will teach them to mean if we are not careful) but ‘the bear I can pull to pieces if I like’. And at the other end of the scale, we have taught men to say ‘my God’ in a sense not really very different from ‘my boots’, meaning ‘the God on whom I have a claim for my distinguished services and whom I exploit from the pulpit — the God I have done a corner in’.

And all the time the joke is that the word ‘Mine’ in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about any thing. In the long run either Our Father or the Enemy will say ‘Mine’ of each thing that exists, and specially of each man. They will find out in the end, never fear, to whom their time, their souls, and their bodies really belong — certainly not to them, whatever happens.

But when all is said and done, in spite of our determined minimalism, Catrien and I still prefer to own our stuff. I’ve tested the concept with friends and colleagues. I came to the conclusion that the cost of ownership pales into insignificance compared to man’s basic urge for ownership. To call it “Mine.”

Kind regards.

Philip de Bruin

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