MANILA, Philippines - Jetski, car, motorbike, a 3-bedroom house in a leafy suburb of Perth, Australia. Promise of new life: priceless.
These were just some of the tchotschkes and possessions that British-born Ian Usher put up for auction on eBay, over a week in June, following a painful divorce.
Large numbers of Britons move to Oz?for the sun, the cost of living, a great outback adventure and the promise of happiness. Usher moved there six years ago, in search of a dream and wedded bliss. When the marriage broke up, Usher decided to divest himself of all his worldly goods.
?I?ve had enough of my life! I don?t want it any more. I?m ready to move on,? he wrote on his website.
Rather than sell individual lots to the usual buyers of second-hand goods, 44-year-old Usher put the contents of his entire life on alife4sale.com, including a mountain bike, barbecue equipment, a trial run at his job in a shop selling rugs and introductions to his friends.
The successful bidder, his sales spiel went, could just walk straight into a ready-made life.
?Why give it all up? Everything is connected with that past life and as I can?t have that life any more, I don?t want to hang on to it,? he wrote. Time to move on to the next big adventure, he said, with just his wallet, passport and the clothes on his back.
Perhaps he has been too long in the Antipodean sun, but Usher seemed to know that a cheerful heart is good medicine for what ailed him.
Usher?s entire hoard and life, at the end of the auction, fetched just A$399,300?A$100,000 below his target. Ever sanguine, he said he wasn?t disappointed by the outcome. He was off.
What makes a life? Bin-ends of happy memories? Toast racks, bedroom slippers, pictures from a holiday? Are our lives paler, poorer without them? What price do we put on our attachment to things we own?
The publishing tycoon Lord Thomson of Fleet was one of the richest?also said to be one of the meanest?men in the world. A friend told him: ?Look here, you know you can?t take it with you.? To which he replied: ?In that case, I?m not going.?
Too much baggage
Among arthropods such as arachnids, ecdysis, or the shedding of dermis and leaving behind discarded skin, is simpler, more straightforward. We humans, on the other hand, carry far too much baggage around a cast-iron carapace that restrains and weighs us down before we could even make a first step when faced with the possibilities of nothingness, but also of everythingness.
Within a few days of Usher?s chagrin d?amour and life auction going live, we heard about 36-year-old Duncan Wilby, father of 2, who, unreachably alone, hanged himself in the family garage, when he couldn?t find the money to pay the arrears on his mortgage.
Faced with eviction, Wilby lost all sense of proportion and hope. Death, to him, was his only way out. In a sad coda to this sorry tale, news of his suicide also reported that his sister, a ?4 million lottery winner, paid off his previous arrears.
?This time, there?s only one way out,? read his text message to his sister before killing himself. The price of a life: ?1,421 in mortgage payments.
Word reached us from America that 23-year-old Olivia Crowther leapt to her death from the Golden Gate Bridge. When her devastated parents visited her London flat to make sense of the irreducible horror of their tragedy, they found suicide sites Olivia accessed on her computer before flying to San Francisco, checking into a hotel and within hours of arriving, jumping to a certain death.
It has been said that she may have found her job in a magazine unbearably stressful. ?She was a loving daughter who seemed to be making her way in the world... We?re all quite baffled and very shocked,? said her parents. The price of a life: a one-way ticket.
No immunization
There?s no safeguard against misery or misfortune, no immunization from melancholy or a disturbed balance of mind. So how do we connect with our nearest and dearest, to fathom their fears, their fight against the furies?
It isn?t, after all, the incidents that befall us that mark out our lives, but the way we react to them that make or shape us, that fell or kill us.
On the eve of publisher Lord Black?s trial in the US for ?corporate kleptocracy,? his wife, the journalist Barbara (?my extravagance knows no bounds?) Amiel, wrote: ?I?m a North London Jew who has read a bit of history. That means I know this: In a century that has seen the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, British and Soviet empires, reversal of fortune is this rich bitch?s reality. One might as well keep working and have the family?s Vuitton suitcases packed.?
The human spirit is weak, but also indefatigable. Some people are smoothed-down looking in neat packages; some are rumpled, ill at ease and out of kilter with the world. Some of us have no talent for repairing broken fragments. Some of us are like Usher who, blessed with the gift for reinvention, use our next ration of good luck, pull in and sail somewhere new.
Handed with lemons, some of us grimace from the tartness. Some of us make lovely lemonades.
No tremolos, for as Gore Vidal once said, self-pity is not box-office. But who can really say how, when faced with similar circumstances, we should react? Are we wimps or are we winners?
Do stuff
The architect Frank Gehry recounts a message from his friend Jay Chiat, the advertising guru, who died of cancer while Gehry was away on a trip.
?I got home and found the message on my answering machine. Jay said, ?I?m calling to say goodbye and to tell you how important you?ve been in my life.? Then he said ?you know, don?t wait, do stuff, do what you want to do.??
Starting over is a new exploring, it is an art, but so is knowing when to leave: abusive relationships, dead-end jobs, the end of an affair, death of a marriage.
The truly important parts of our sojourn on this planet?the ones we cherish in our sunset years?should be like hand luggage, easily transportable, not demarcated by geography, nor impeded by heavy baggage.
True travellers leave for the sake of leaving, light and unencumbered. Hope is quite possibly the mother of all self-deceptions, but a useful one. All life and its material trappings, in time, really do come down to so little.
Hello; goodbye. And there is absolutely nothing which fortune does not dare.
