Where Me and Things Belong

           The film Breakfast at Tiffany’s begins with the scene of a taxi driving down a 1960’s street, dimly aglow by streetlights, and pausing outside 727, Tiffany Co. A willowy woman emerges from the taxi in a heel-hugging black dress. Stacking rows of pearls hang from her slender collar bone. She lingers in front of the darkened store window, reaches a black gloved hand into a paper bag she clutches closely to her chest, and retrieves a pastry. She surveys the display of diamonds with eyes hidden behind classic black sunglasses. She effortlessly tilts a head heavy with a swirling updo and tiara from side to side, taking in the “quietness and the proud look of it.” She is under the impression that at Tiffany’s “nothing very bad could happen to you.” She is calmed here by the the illusion of belonging. In her sparsely furnished apartment, feeding her nameless cat a saucer of milk, Holly Golightly explains her sentiments for Tiffany’s to her friend Paul Varjak: “Poor cat! Poor slob! Poor slob without a name! The way I see it, I haven’t gotten the right to give him one. We don’t belong to each other. We just took up one day by the river. I don’t want to own anything until I find a place where me and things go together. I’m not sure where that is, but I know what it is like. It’s like Tiffany’s...I’m just crazy about Tiffany’s! I’m like cat here, a no-name slob. We belong to nobody, and nobody belongs to us. We don’t even belong to each other.”
 
          I think many people would empathize with Holly’s desire to find “a place where me and things go together.” But like Holly, despite our generation becoming increasingly more mobile, many millennials struggle to find the one place where they belong. One’s hometown is no longer necessarily synonymous with feelings of belonging. (Le Penne 535) But the search for belonging is not a purely a millennial struggle. Abraham Maslow, describes belonging as one of the basic needs of humanity. (581-582) It was God’s promise of belonging that prompted a whole race of people to wander in the desert for 40 years on a diet of quail and manna in pursuit of a home. Thousands of immigrants risk everything at the border of The United States, desperately believing that they do not belong in their home country. This universal search for belonging is a pursuit of a transient although fundamental, human need, which is ultimately satisfied not in striving but in right relationship with Christ.

          While many struggle to find the place where they truly belong, most like Holly, can describe what belonging is like. We each experience belonging at different times and difference places, but our experience of belonging is more similar than different. I define belonging as a right relationship with a place and everything in it. We belong in the place of which we can say, “I am with all this, and rightly so.” There are many prior conditions to belonging, namely safety and health, without which belonging is the least of one’s worries, as Maslow states, “If both the physiological and the safety needs are fairly well gratified, then there will emerge the love and affection and belongingness needs . . . He will hunger for affectionate relations with people in general, namely, for a place in his group, and he will strive with great intensity to achieve this goal. He will want to attain such a place more than anything else in the world and may even forget that once, when he was hungry, he sneered at love.” (581-582) Since feelings of belonging do not flourish in an unsafe or starved place, or one that has limited resources, belonging is evasive. Most of our experiences of belonging are transient, but it is a more permanent sense of belonging that we desire.

          As a college student, I didn’t mind the green damp seeping into my blue jeans as I lay over tree roots and grass. I braced my head with my hands and breathed in the Spring air. The air smelling like moist earth, fish water, and deep-fried grease, skirted between the tree leaves hanging over my head. A book on the history of Western Civilization, or some other bit of time so distant from mine, is forgotten in the grass by my side. I hear my name and start, sitting up and waving at a train of familiar faces on their way to lunch or class. This is how I would study, lying beneath my tree outside my college cafeteria, passing priceless moments of gratuitous measure. I can never recreate this particular sensation of belonging, even if I were to return to my alma mater and throw myself at the feet of this tree. No doubt another student sits there soaking in its calming power, waving at faces unfamiliar to me. Transient belonging incarnate in a tree.

          Holly proclaimed with a an air of cheerful resignation, “If I could find a real-life place that’d make me feel like Tiffany’s, then - then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name!” Belonging is an evasive good, but not one that is unattainable. We can experience belonging, some manifestations of belonging being more lasting than others. Like most good things, humans can make an idol of belonging. We can sacrifice, and make concessions, and compromise our values, in an attempt to manufacture a sense of belonging with the wrong people or in the wrong places. In his lecture, The Inner Ring, C.S Lewis warns, “As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.” As long as we spend our time striving to belong, we will never belong anywhere.

           Belonging will occur authentically, in the right place and time, when we live as we were called to as Christians, dwelling on who we are in Christ. “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.” (Isaiah 43:1) We belong to Christ, and that is the most permanent most powerful relationship of belonging anyone can experience. For even when have nothing else, our physiological needs and our safety needs are not being met, we still and always will belong to Christ. “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:31)

Works Cited

Le Penne, Shirley. “Longing to Belong: Needing to Be Needed in a World in Need.” Society, vol. 54, 2017, p. 535., doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-017-0185-y.

Lewis, C.S. “The Inner Ring.” Memorial Lecture, 1944, King’s College, University of London.

Maslow, Abraham H. “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Psychological Review, vol. 50, 1943, pp. 381–382.