Inanimate things can have spirits, apparently. They can speak to people, and have a sense of themselves — they talk about their aggravations, their hopes, their relief when a new owner rescues them from a life of languishing.

Of course, the spirit isn’t actually in the thing; it’s in the orientation a person takes towards it. There was a time when I did not understand this mode of thought. I was talking to someone whose car had a personality, and even a gender. I asked how she knew the gender of the car, but she could only tell me “You’ll just know”. I didn’t know about my car, and it died well before I figured out how to ask.

What I admired at the time was how sometimes people treated ordinary things with great reverence. The usual consumerist attitude—unwittingly adopted by so many of us in the first world—is that broken or worn-out things things should be thrown away and replaced without a second thought. Once, I saw someone take special care mending a pair of pants that had done good service for her. It was like watching someone care for an injured pet. At the time I didn’t really get how people could be that way, but I could tell that I was witnessing some complex of virtues, and I knew I was missing out.

Nowadays, I find myself understanding those events better, even though they’re years in my past. I think I picked up the practice from Yasser Seirawan, who in his chess lectures recommends the technique of speaking to the chess pieces: go to each piece individually and ask it how it’s doing and gently probe whether it’s happy with what it’s doing to contribute. The pieces want nothing else but to help you win, and they know when they’re being left out; when they tell you about it, you need to pay attention. It might sound crazy, or obsessive, or irrational, or unhelpful, but no matter how the idea is derided, Yasser is a super-grandmaster, and he didn’t get there by being stupid.

Therefore, my first attempt at using this way of thinking was in chess. To be honest, I don’t know the game well enough to extract too much use out of it. The language I’ve been using might lead you to think that I don’t need to know, that I could just listen to the pieces, but remember: it’s not actually hearing mystical voices; it’s just a different way of asking a question. I may not know chess, but what I do know is shape, color, and tactility. So, when I started using more than one fountain pen and more than one ink during the day, I also started communing with my pens. I choose my ink not based on its performance, but on how it fit’s the pen’s personality. Isn’t that odd?, how something so trivial can have a soul?

We get to choose how we approach the people and things in our lives, and I find it’s so much more enjoyable to recognize a life that isn’t your own. Artifact spirit is what you see when you approach an otherwise purely functional item as if it is meaningful—as if it has a purpose in this world beyond getting used up—but it’s only one part of the picture. Our various connections, whether to humans, to the universe, to animals, to ideas, or to tools, all have different kinds of impacts, but what they have in common is finding and cherishing the spirit in something outside ourselves. I can’t think of many aspirations better than that.