“Things” are omnipresent in life. They collect like dust piled on a windowsill – always there, but not directly noticed. To steal, once again from E.B. White, “a man could walk away for a thousand mornings carrying something with him to the corner and there would still be a home full of stuff. It is not possible to keep abreast of the normal tides of acquisition … (which) go on day and night – subtly, smoothly, imperceptibly. I have no sharp taste for acquiring things, but it is not necessary to desire things in order to acquire them … Under ordinary circumstances, the only stuff that leaves a home is paper trash and garbage; everything else stays on and digs in.”
Amen. I have so much … stuff. Why? Because I’m alive. People acquire things over time, and then we don’t even know why we have them or where they came from. Honestly, I have thrown more things away in the past few years than ever before. I just don’t see the need to keep THINGS which don’t get used or have a practical purpose. For example, I threw away almost all of my old pictures of people from high school. Why? Because I don’t even know those people any more. I don’t give a shit about them. They are from another life – a million years ago, so why should they occupy space in my photo albums? They shouldn’t. So they got trashed. Burned, actually, which was quite satisfying to my inner pyromaniac.
I also threw away the old notes from boyfriends and friends from back in the day a long time ago. Some might argue that those things are artifacts from a different time, and thus worthy of saving, but I think they just get in the way of moving on. Again, I don’t even know those people anymore, so why would I keep mementos of them? Prime example: I went to a concert the other day, and I saw a person I use to date. (You know, like in the “intimate” sense of the word “date.”) He didn’t even recognize me - literally had no idea who I was!! How is that even possible? It made me want to throw up at the time, but now I understand that he must be better than me at evacuating the extraneous bullshit from his memory. People can sometimes also count as things we collect or can’t let go of.
Anyway, the point is that things become leeches. They pull at one’s emotions and refuse to let go. Why can’t I throw away that trophy from 6th grade soccer? Who gives a shit what place our little Catholic school team came in? I don’t care (or remember).
I have my two degrees from college setting on the bookshelf in my basement. Again, why? It’s not like I need to prove that I graduated twice. That’s what transcripts are for. If I had any guts I’d burn them and call them past tense, but keeping crap like that is ingrained in peoples’ minds from the moment they’re born. Parents clip and save locks of hair from a first haircut, or Student of the Month certificates, or Little League trophies, and those “things” become quite hard to part with. We may sweep them into a drawer or stuff them in a box in the back of the closet, but actually disposing of them is much harder than throwing away a frayed rug or some worn-out shoes. Such sentimentality placed on items that have no real value, except as relics, seems misguided if the purpose of life is to move forward.
Most of the things I can’t let go of take the form of books or photos, probably because both have the capacity to take me somewhere else briefly. Photographs are lovely, even though I take them hardly at all any more. I used to chronicle everything, and now … well, now fewer things strike me as remarkable enough to document. When I look at the pictures of a previous vacation, I just want to be back in that place, which isn’t so great for my current happiness. So while I have volumes of scrapbooks piled under my bookshelf, they mainly just collect dust.
I will admit that I am a bit of a materialist: I love my bed. I love my blankets, my pillows, my saris, my collection of high heels, my books, my dresses, my candle holders, my ipod, my Blackberry, my framed photos, my vinyl records, my garden, and so on. I would never readily give these things away, but they don’t add meaning to my life either – only temporary comforts. I’d like to move, if simply to de-clutter the rest of my life. How freeing it must be to leave behind the old and simplify. Shed the skin.
Free your mind; the rest will follow.
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