Where Do You Keep Your Soul?

Your deepest self is revealed by the things you keep.

Do you know what a soul is? Sorry, I don’t have a definition for you. It’s like defining love. We all know it when we see it, when we feel it. But the very act of definition diminishes it. I figured out why that is. It’s because words aren’t up to the task. Love exists at the feeling level, not the language level. Similarly, the soul is the foundation of what it means to be human, much more fundamental than conscious or even unconscious thought. Soul, like love, is beyond the reach of language.

So let me try anyway.

I know what soul is not. It’s not physical. It’s not a thing. But it’s also not a thought, and it’s not an emotion. Is it a spirit that inhabits you? That would imply that it can also escape you. I guess a lot of humanity believes that…that the soul is an animating force that inhabits us for the span or our lives, then departs upon death, maybe to go on to inhabit someone else (reincarnation), or become elevated to a new kind of existence, or maybe just to extinguish, like a light bulb turning off. Nobody knows for sure.

We do know that, when the soul leaves the body, the body becomes inanimate matter…just a lump of stuff that used to be somebody.

Does that mean that the soul is life itself? That doesn’t seem right. A cockroach has life, but does it have a soul? I don’t think so, but what do I know? Maybe, as some beliefs suggest, every object, plant, or creature has a soul. I doubt that I’ll ever know.

But I do know that I have a soul. Everything I have done in my life bears the imprint of my soul. All my achievements. All my failures. All my relationships (the good ones as well as the bad). All my thoughts and beliefs.

There’s evidence for all of this, isn’t there? I have many things I’ve collected and kept around me…pictures, writings, souvenirs, diplomas, things people have given me over the years, the books that sit on my shelves, the junk collected in drawers and boxes. If you could look at all of it, it would tell you something about me at a very deep level. You would know something about my soul.

So, my question, “Where do you keep your soul?” is really about the things I’ve collected over the years, the things that, more than words, describe the deepest parts of me. Those things are not my soul, but they remind me of it, and, if you care to look, they tell you about it. When I’m gone, I want those things—some of them anyway—to be kept by those I love, those who will be left behind when I’m gone. Those people are themselves evidence of my soul. They each bear my imprint, but they are each much more than my contributions. They are products of their own construction—their own souls.

Where do I keep my soul? It’s within me, just as yours is within you…it is me, just as yours is you. But it also exists in the things, and the people, and the memories, that I value.

I keep most of this stuff in my inner sanctum, which, for me, is an extra bedroom, converted into a makeshift office. Everywhere I glance, I see a piece of my soul. A three-by-five index card with my hand-written wedding vows to my wife (I accidentally read it backwards at our wedding ceremony). A favorite picture of one of my daughters. The flag that draped my father’s coffin. A book that touched me deeply. The saber that I carried as a cadet at West Point. A klutzy paperweight that my granddaughter made when she was small. A picture of a sad clown, painted by my mother, years before she died. The very arrangement of the room itself, which follows patterns that are meaningful to me and no one else. And probably a lot of stuff that I don’t even recognize as meaningful, but supports me in some unconscious way.

Do you do that, too? Do you collect pieces of your soul? And if you do, where do you keep them?