More than two years ago I peeked in a cup on my son’s desk and found this little collection of objects, stashed away much like a hamster might store sunflower seeds and corn kernels in its nest, complete with specks of lint and fluff.

What made me stop to take a photograph was the juxtaposition of so many things – nature, time, circumstance, chance – and the map of sorts that it offered in terms of what being a human on Earth might entail. I liked that it felt like a partly conscious, partly random building of some sort of tentative identity on my son’s part, a kind of ‘top hits’ of his interests or likes over a specific period in time. It had been grouped organically – not everything had gone into the cup all at once, but rather, it had grown gradually, and, judging by the lint, had mostly been left untouched for relatively long periods. Over time, it had become a peculiar little family of treasured possessions.

A fossilized shark tooth; a very ordinary marble; a small pinecone from the park; a cheap, little elephant trinket; and a long, tangled piece of dental floss. A mix of deliberate and haphazard choices; a kind of crossroads sign exploding off into a dizzying number of directions to explore.

The elephant was bought for him by his father from an African street vendor in Zaragoza, and is made to look like wood or ivory but, judging from some examples I found of the exact same elephant used for costume jewellery, it is most likely acrylic, and mass-produced. The raised trunk is meant to signify good luck. It was, and still is, the perfect size to fit in the palm of his hand.

The fossilized shark tooth came in a starter box of fossils – it is from Madagascar and is anywhere from 5 to 23 million years old. We have since acquired more fossils, and I would say that is one of the more conscious elements of this treasure. I seem to remember the pinecone being picked up on a walk mostly because of its satisfying size. The dental floss is a leftover from an attempt at making ‘web-shooters’ during a Spider-Man obsession that lasted for a very long time, and I am particularly tickled that it found its home next to a fossilized shark tooth. Lastly, the provenance of the marble is an unsolved mystery, and my son recalls no special attachment to it at all, but… where was he to put it? What does one do with a single marble that would otherwise roll everywhere? Once it was added to this little family, it became more meaningful and turned into a different category of object.

As I was thinking about these items, it occurred to me that, were I to look in my daughter’s room, it would be harder to find something similar in terms of a collection, and this is not only due to her age (she turns 14 on the week I am writing this, my son was 8 when I took the photograph). In many ways, her way of relating to the world so far appears to take place mostly as a mental, intangible activity that does not leave as many material traces – perhaps I would have to look to books, clothes or music, but nothing as lasting as a marble or a fossil. Perhaps her most constant, treasured possession is a stuffed cat from when she was a toddler, but she generally does not hold on to objects too much and is happy – even keen – to dispose of things that she no longer uses or looks at. This observation made me think about how imprecise and unbalanced our picture must be, and how we nevertheless can’t help but fill in the gaps and tell ourselves stories based on what we think we can see.

It also made me think about how identities are shaped during our childhoods, and to what extent they are curated, by oneself or by others, accidentally or not. How many metaphorical marbles gathering lint might there be? And how many marbles have been disposed of?

If the contents of my bedside table were taken as my treasure, what would they say about me? What stories could be pulled from them? How much of it would I recognise as my own? Does it matter?

I have a friend who is a building contractor. Occasionally his work requires clearing out homes that have been left semi-empty or abandoned for years. Among all the rubbish, he sometimes comes across items that he feels deserve to be set aside. He has no interest in selling them –  he doesn’t feel like they are his to sell, and making other arrangements like donating is time-consuming and often fruitless.  He ends up taking certain items home, spurred, I like to think, by an impulse similar to taking an injured bird home so it can heal in peace, before watching it fly away. Here, the ‘bird’ doesn’t fly away, but instead is given a new life and, like the marble, becomes a different category of object. It feels strange, almost sacrilegious, to throw away certain items that were once clearly important to someone, and it is a little as though he is extending the lives of these objects and, I suppose, of their original owners.

When I saw his small collection, this quiet, unassuming activity of his – the salvaging of fragments of strangers’ lives, and the manner in which it was done – struck me as delicate and conscious; a kind of identifying of ephemeral threads of human life that was respectful, aware, and also somehow exciting.

They now belonged in a different life and a different context, and I loved the repurposing and retelling of stories that this involved. Is there not a game where you write out a story and then cut up the sentences to rearrange them into something new? I was also reminded of a sort of a three-dimensional exquisite corpse: they had been put next to other initially unrelated objects, and in doing so, something new had been created. At its core, it was akin to privately setting up a still life in a corner of his living room, meant for his eyes only.

When I thought about the different ways in which we collect our various treasures, I was reminded of the intensely private and by all accounts personally peculiar and cripplingly shy Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) and his boxes – wondrously delicate, poetic new universes created out of found objects, which he crafted at his home in the aptly named Utopia Parkway, New York. Olivia Laing writes that, prior to starting his artistic career in the early 1930s, he had already built up

“[…] a vast private museum from his excursions, toting home treasure in the form of rare books, magazines, postcards, playbills, librettos, records and early films. Stranger things, too: shells and rubber balls, crystal swans, compasses, bobbins and corks,”

Later in the article, Laing writes

 “[…] he never lost his ability to look and be moved – bowled over, even – by the things he saw, from birds in a tree (“cheery-upping of insistent Robin”), or shifts in the weather, to the marvellous traffic of his dreams and visions.

“Gratitude, acknowledgement & remembrance for something that can so easily get lost”, he wrote in his diary on 27 December 1972, two days before he died of heart failure, inadvertently summing up the abiding genius of his own work.”

Perhaps that last sentence by Cornell in his diary also sums up why I was moved by my friend’s apparently modest activity, and why I stopped to photograph my son’s treasure, which seemed to contain so much more than five small objects, and triggered many ponderings about how we relate to objects, and what we are doing when we choose which ones to keep and make a part of our lives, from early childhood till the end.