Purchasing furniture and house- or apartment-ware is one of the defining moments in one’s maturity. Whether a bed, kitchen table or can opener, the process of shopping for and buying these items is significant. You are now in charge of the items that surround you; your quality of life can be severely impacted for better or worse based on these possessions.

Some people are blissfully happy to live with the bare essentials: One of my friends knows a guy who subscribes to “minimalism,” owning a pair of jeans, six plain white T-shirts, a pair of shoes and a foam mattress. I’m not sure if that’s the exhaustive list or just a taste of his individual lifestyle, but either way, he and I belong to completely different ends of the spectrum of materialism.

When I moved from a shared house into my single-bedroom apartment this spring, my family and peers were unanimously astonished at the bulk of my belongings. Most scoffed at my optimistic goal of being able to successfully arrange everything while still permitting movement.

Taking a page out of the book from Sweden via Ikea, I made it happen, and have a significant amount of floor space left to walk around in.

However, on a recent weekend home, my mom and I went to Pier 1 Imports for their summer sale, and I discovered what may be the most comfortable style of chair yet developed: the papasan.

Made of something like bamboo and wicker, the chair is essentially a large, shallow bowl that sits off-center upon a short, tapering cylindrical stand. A large round cushion fills the bowl, and the chair provides the sitter a delightful nest of coziness far better suited to reading than my futon-couch, office chair, kitchen chairs or bed. Another friend has deemed the papasan the iconic “college-kid” chair, with nothing denoting that demographic more than this particular piece of furniture.

I brooded on my desire for one such chair for about a week. Once my self-enforced seven-day wait period had expired, I was still desirous to add a papasan to my apartment and proceeded to shop.

As it turns out, there is apparently a pretty set price for these things; there was no benefit to shopping around because all retailers sell the same papasan for the same price.

I had almost decided that I could put this off or forget it entirely when I came upon Cost Plus World Market. Looking at their papasan selection and momentarily confused as to which store I was in, a woman randomly asked me if I was shopping for one such chair. I said that yes, I was.

She got excited and told me not to buy one: She had a papasan that she was trying to get rid of and would give it to me if I’d just show up at her place and take it away. She gave me a phone number, and we parted. This was assuredly a sign that fate wanted me to own this chair.

Sadly, the number she gave me was disconnected, and though she told me the name of her apartment complex, I wasn’t even sure how to spell her first name. I never got the chair.

After two days of brooding at the missed opportunity of free furniture, I got on Craigslist to see if she had perhaps listed it there after the disappointment of never hearing back from that polite young man with excellent hair who never called her back from Cost Plus World Market.

Fate did, in fact, want me to have a papasan — it just wanted me to pay for it, as it turned out. A woman in the exact same apartment complex as the Cost Plus woman had listed an identical papasan to the one I was expecting to receive the previous weekend. However, her name was completely different, and after agreeing over the phone to pay her approximately half of what I would pay at Cost Plus or Pier 1, I ventured to her apartment to pick up my new chair.

It’s delightful, and I feel it was meant to be mine. Hours will be spent in that chair reading, eating Honey Nut Cheerios, drinking tea, cocoa or coffee and watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia or Malcolm in the Middle. With this purchase, I now at the end of my quest for possession acquisition. There just is no more room for anything more.

Reach columnist Matt Jackson at opinion@dailyuw.com.