I was walking through the park blocks recently and thinking about something or other, and my train of thought led me to thinking about stuff. The stuff that accumulates in our lives, over time, seems inevitable, like wrinkles or grey hairs or regrets.
It's something i have been pondering for some time in my efforts to become less, to own less, buy less, simplify. I have given away car loads of time to Goodwill the last several years, stratigraphic layers of my life I have been able to excavate and discard.
But it's still there, in the basement, in the closet, on the shelf... things of no significance in of themselves. Alone, they have no value.
The basement, the basement is filled with the remnants of a shared life, the broken pieces that cracked off and were left behind to be swept up and forgotten, for me to deal with, dispose of, despise.
It's also home to the shed moltings of my life that have no place anywhere else, but that I can't let GO. Obligations, memories, detritus..fingernail clippings and fallen hairs...
I thought about how, there is a mantle of things in my room that represent me. totems, physical manifestations of a place, time and situation. It's like I need these things to remember, lest my memory lets them slip away unbeknowst to me and I realise I've lost something, but I'm not sure what.
Would it be better to let these little objects d' vinget go and let my mind become uncluttered?
It's my house full of things I can't let go of because my mind is cluttered up with things I should let go?
I know that this mausoleum of things keeps me a bit immobile,I have moved with a lot of it before, but the longer you stay in a places, the more this stuff grows, home as a petri dish. It's the lint of living, you keep collecting it under the couch, on your coat, and you try to get rid of it, but it just sticks.
I've seen the garages of families, packed with this sort of lint, piles so high and wide, there is no room to live in it, no room to park a car, make a cabinet, play instruments...and I wonder if it's entropy, inertia...are we doomed to collect stuff?
I don't want it.
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Every couple of years - often after some big life shake-up - I do a purge of stuff that I think might be weighing me down. I don't want to be the sort of person who acquires things just for taking up space, but once they are in my life they are awfully difficult to get rid of. After each great purge, there are usually one or two items I am sad, in retrospect, to have lost. My new plan: to have fewer things to begin with, thereby avoiding getting rid of the wrong thing.
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