On knowing where your towel is: a theory of essentimentials
As everybody knows, there aren’t nearly enough words in the English language. So here’s a new one: essentimential. An essentimential is an ordinary object with a basic, everyday function which has taken on sentimental importance, and becomes an essential item both because of its emotional significance and because of the useful function it performs.
When I go walking, my tent is very useful, and I would be stuck without it, but I’m not particularly attached to it. If a friend borrowed it, lost it and replaced it with an equivalent one, it wouldn’t bother me. It isn’t an essentimential. Alternatively, if I take a lucky charm with me, a little trinket or a photograph of a loved one, its importance is all in the sentiment, and it doesn’t perform a mundane function independent of the way it makes me feel. It’s not an essentimential. Essentimentials are ordinary things that have done you good service over the years: things you’re fond of because you can connect them to lots of memories, but also because they’re good at doing the basic thing you take them along for. You’ve relied on them, and you’re grateful to them. They’re trusty companions. They’re not special, but they’re special to you.
There’s no reason to insist that essentimentials have to be connected to travelling, but for me at least, long walks and journeys to distant places have tended to be the contexts that give rise to the strongest relationships with objects of this type. Even then, I have only ever had a few true essentimentials.
I once had a very ordinary bamboo pole that I used as a walking stick over the course of a few weeks walking in Southeast Asia. It was good to have some support, slogging along roads with quite a heavy pack, and it helped me cross one or two ditches and broken bridges, and it was invaluable for warding off unfriendly dogs. It was an essentimential to me at the time, and at one point when I realised I’d left it behind in a guesthouse I walked back several miles for it, even though it had no monetary value at all and I could easily have acquired another one. I left it in a friend’s flat in Yangon, and always vaguely hoped I might bring it home at some point, but the flat is long gone, and so is the stick, and after all, it was just a bit of bamboo, slightly cracked at one end, with a tiny bit of gravel somehow stuck inside it, rattling around when you shook it. Since then, I’ve made myself another bamboo walking pole, much fancier, with a loop for the wrist, and a handle made from garden twine and an old pair of pants, and the tip bound with wire to keep it from splitting, but I’ve only used it a few times, and it’s not an essentimential yet.
I have a light cotton scarf that I take everywhere with me, which does make the cut as an essentimential. I had an even better one in my twenties: a big square of brown and black checked muslin, five feet by five feet when you stretched it out, weighing almost nothing. As well as wearing it as a scarf, I used it as a pillow, a sunshade, a face mask in dusty places, a makeshift mosquito net. I covered my eyes with it to go to sleep on buses and trains, I could wrap it round as a kind of turban if I’d forgotten a hat, and I used it as a sarong to get changed on beaches; it was big enough to be a lightweight blanket, and I think I even strung it up as a washing line once or twice. I took that scarf on dozens of trips; it was frayed and stained and it was probably my favourite thing that I owned. I lent it to someone on a cold night outside a club in Poland and never managed to reclaim it. But there’s another one that I’ve had now for probably ten years; it’s not quite as big, and it doesn’t quite have the New York 1960s folk scene vibe of the old one, but it’s been to a lot of places with me and I’m very fond of it now. That’s the kind of thing that makes an essentimential.
Douglas Adams knew all about essentimentials. Dedicated fans of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy celebrate 25 May as Towel Day, because a towel:
… is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you — daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost." What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
My scarf wouldn’t be much good in hand-to-hand combat, and I have never used it to sail a raft, but it’s good to keep a few life goals in reserve. And as it happens, I have quite frequently used it as a towel.
I think the experience of becoming sentimentally attached to an otherwise ordinary object is worth dwelling on a little.
When we talk about people being ‘materialistic’ or ‘acquisitive’, they’re pejorative words: they imply a binary division between greedy, unimaginative people who just care about physical stuff, and wise, spiritual people who are indifferent to such worldly trifles and instead go around in rags sniffing the breeze and admiring the stars (whether it's the ones that shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon, or just the normal ones we have here). But in fact there are all sorts of different approaches that people can have towards material possessions, and they don’t fit neatly into these categories.
Some of the least money-oriented people I know—people who don’t have any apparent desire to be wealthy, or to own prestigious or high-status goods—also have strong tendencies to become attached to specific objects, responding to their history, or their aesthetic qualities, or, very often, both at once. These people often have a knack for surrounding themselves with beautiful things, most of which will have some kind of story or connection attached to them, and if any of them also happen to be valuable in monetary terms, that’s largely incidental, and isn’t a big part of their attraction.
I also know people who appear much more conventionally ‘materialistic’, expensively dressed and partial to luxurious items and experiences—but who are extremely generous, and liberal about their possessions. They like nice stuff, but they don’t get attached to it, and will part with it willingly. Perhaps sometimes they can afford to do so, but it isn’t just that. Not all of these people are wealthy. It’s just that they’re not sentimentally bound to their possessions, and in fact I often sense that what attracts them is the chance to use an item, not an urge to own and retain it, and they can quite easily let it go once they’ve enjoyed it for a while.
These are two very different ways of relating to possessions, and they cut across the simple binary division between people who are materialistic, and people who aren't.
There is, of course, an ascetic ideal, recurring in many cultures, of a person who genuinely has no interest in material things—either as an innate quality or, more likely, as a state they have achieved through spiritual practice. From ancient Chinese mountain hermits to Franciscan friars, numerous traditions have embraced an ideal of poverty; owning nothing and experiencing discomfort are common indicators of holiness in its various forms. But for those of us who either haven’t achieved that level of non-attachment, or who don’t aspire to it in the first place, it seems worth asking: how do we want to relate to our stuff? Given that few people are ready to embrace total asceticism, but that not many of us believe that money and material things are all we need to be happy, is it better to emulate the sentimental aesthetes or the generous fashionistas? And where does it leave my essentimentials?
From a Buddhist point of view, strong feelings of attachment are typically somewhat suspect—in general, attachment is what we are trying to get away from—but it seems to me that just trashing those feelings wherever they arise isn’t a particularly nuanced strategy. It’s not a very wise approach to our relationships with the people around us, and I suspect it’s not always a wise approach to objects either. And in fact, the distinction between those categories is messier than it might first appear.
Looking at my relationship with my scarf, a stereotypically Western, analytical, dualistic approach would distinguish sharply between persons and things, confident that I am a person and my scarf is a thing. But a less dualistic understanding, based perhaps on some Buddhist insights into the elusive nature of the individual self and its porous boundaries, might lead us to different perspectives.1 One might ask: is my body part of ‘me’? Are my stomach bacteria part of ‘me’? What about my fingernails? (Do they continue to be part of me after I cut them?) Are they more essential to me than the way I dress, or my relationship with other people? These are impossible lines to draw: so what about my scarf? Can I define ‘myself’ clearly enough to say for certain that it is not part of me? If not, the recognition that I am partly made of cotton might be a helpful thought to return to when I need some help untangling myself from my ego.
Alternatively, we might interrogate the feelings we have towards essentimentials in a bit more depth. As ultra-rational, common-sense adults, we typically see a child’s affection for a teddy bear as irrational, make-believe, childish—hopefully harmless, but not something that would be appropriate for a mature adult. But that might be a prejudice worth challenging. If an object has been a source of comfort and companionship, what’s wrong with a bit of grateful appreciation in response?
Cultivating gratitude and appreciation towards non-human objects and phenomena is a fairly wholesome spiritual practice, and essentimentials are an easy place to start. I’ve noticed that one of the things that really promotes essentimential status is the experience of using an object in many different ways, as I have done with my scarf, and as Douglas Adams’ galactic hitchhikers do with their towels. I’ve used my compass a lot, but I’ve only ever used it as a compass. With my scarf and its many functions, I have a sense that it’s gone above and beyond its duty: it has been more than a scarf to me, and I am grateful to it. Why not?
My other firm essentimential is a blue-enamelled steel mug. It isn’t quite as multi-purpose as my scarf, but it does pretty well. I’ve had it for about twenty years, ever since an Interrailing trip aged eighteen: an age at which having a metal cup attached prominently to the outside of one’s backpack felt like a non-negotiable requirement, a travelling credential at least as important as my passport. On that trip it was mostly used as a vessel for plum schnapps: but since then I’ve perched it on my camping stove to heat water for tea and coffee countless times, and I’ve also cooked porridge and instant noodles and miso soup in it. It’s a material reminder of all the times I’ve used it for different things, too: admittedly I don’t recall every single cup of tea, but I do remember the times I’ve used it as a receptacle for foraged leaves and flowers, or as a mallet to bash in tent pegs; and I certainly remember using it to collect coins during my brief career as a busker. (‘Brief’: an hour and a half on a rainy Monday lunchtime in St Austell; ‘coins’: a grand total of £1.60.)
Again, it feels as though it has helped me out in ways for which it was never designed, and again I am grateful to it. Consciously cultivating that gratitude, and then extending it to some of the countless other objects and beings that are helpful to me every single day, might not be a bad route into appreciating the many fortunate ways in which I am connected to the universe around me.
I still look with some admiration on those friends who don’t seem to get attached to their possessions, and are happy to release them without a backward glance when the time comes. But these reflections also help me to feel more positively about the bonds that tie many of us to certain physical objects. As a family we are between long-term homes at the moment, so most of our possessions are in a storage container, and I have admitted to my partner that I would feel mainly relief if the whole thing went up in flames.2 It’s not really because I don’t care for anything that’s in the container: it’s also because I have come to see my sentimental attachments as burdensome ties, and as evidence of my own weakness, rather than accepting them them as part of the rich network of relationships between my present and past selves, and the people and objects with whom we have interacted. If I can reorient my feelings a little—more appreciation, and less self-judgment—while also challenging myself to let things go, perhaps I’ll do better at giving away what I don’t need, while being grateful for what I have, and crucially, knowing where it is.
Happy Towel Day to all who celebrate it.
1. These observations do have their counterparts in Western philosophy, Derek Parfitt’s work on personhood being a notable example
2. (For the record, and in case any arsonists are reading, she doesn’t entirely share the feeling.)