No More Chairs Necessary

As I was walking down to the creek, a couple of kilometres from my house, one thing became very clear to me. We do not need to make any more chairs in this world. The world, or at least my street, was definitely overflowing with discarded seating arrangements. Chairs. So many of them. Stacked on top of each other, stacked on each other upside down in a naughty 69 formation, stacked sideways, or spread out like posts in a field because they were simply un-stackable. So many chairs. It was hard-rubbish weekend, you see, and it did just make me wonder and ponder about the symbolism of the chair. Architects have a fetish about the chair. It’s a little like designing and redesigning the perfect spoon, or singing Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”, the chair is a symbol of undefined-refined, and almost impossibly-unachievable-of-reinvention invention. It is an out-of-grasp beauty and form at its simplest. And yet there are multitudes of ways to form a chair, to shape its back, its legs, its cushioned seat. I know because I saw them. I saw them stacked on top of each other begging to be loved again. I saw them hugging each other for warmth as the clouds were rolling in. I saw them cry curled up in fetal position in the damp grass. It’s a funny thing, chair - we simply don’t seem to be able to let go of it but when we do, we do so with undeserving cruelty. One thing is clear, this world does not need any more chairs; we should first learn how to love the ones we have already got.