The Things I Kept Picking Up

I didn't decide to collect crests this spring. I just noticed, somewhere around the tenth shop, that I already was — and that I'd been telling myself it was nothing.

This is the first in a small series about noticing — the quiet practice of staying with a thing one beat longer than usual, instead of filing it away as background noise. 

Every spring I work a circuit of charity shops while visiting friends and family — somewhere around forty of them, end to end, over a few weeks. And I do pick a lane, more or less on purpose. Last year it was blue china and Folio Society first editions. The year before, something else. There's always a thread.

So it's not that I don't choose. I choose. What I miss is what the choosing is about.

This year I got home, spread it all out, and saw it. Church ephemera and shields. A crested plate — two little animals holding up a shield, a motto curling underneath. A small tartan book, thick with clan arms and badges. A football trophy. A walking stick, covered in badges. An old motoring guide stamped with a coat of arms. A schoolbook with an emblem worked into the woodcut on its title page. A stack of presentation certificates, all crests and flourishes and someone's name in copperplate. 

Marks. Emblems. Shields. Little symbols that announce whose this was, and what they wanted to stand for. I'd been reaching for them all spring — registering it, every time, and just as quickly setting it down as nothing in particular.

What it was actually about

I love a skull as much as the next gal who runs a slightly witchy shop. So when I looked at which symbols I'd actually kept, I expected more of the dark register.

But the things my hand went back to, again and again, were warmer than that. Open palms. Horseshoes. The sun. The star. The symbols people have used for centuries to mean luck, protection, hope — the upturned hand that receives rather than the fist that holds.

That surprised me, and then it made me grateful, and I want to say plainly why.

The world feels heavy. It feels dark, most days, in a way that makes optimism seem a little embarrassing — like something you should have grown out of. And here was the evidence of my own hands, gathered up on a table, telling me that when nobody was choosing for effect, when it was just me and a shelf in a quiet shop, I reached for the light. Every time. Luck. The sun. Good things, please.

I don't think that's naïve. I think it might be the opposite. Anyone can be hopeful when things are easy. To keep instinctively reaching for the lucky symbol while the news is what it is — that's not optimism that never met the world. It's optimism that met the world and kept going anyway. I'm glad I can still see it. I didn't decide to. I just caught myself doing it, on the one day I didn't look away.

That's what noticing gives you. Not a plan for who to be — proof of who you already are, underneath the part of you that's busy performing.

The world is full of messages. Many of them are loud, and often selling you something. But there's a quieter set, and they're the ones you have to be still long enough to name — the ones you register all the time and discard before they can land. What do you keep picking up? Keep photographing? What themes come back without you quite knowing why?

Slow down for a minute and notice what you notice. Don't judge the answer, and don't decide it in advance.

Then ask the question that actually matters.

What is the thing you keep noticing trying to show you?

Mine, this spring, turned out to be hope. I'll take it.