Perhaps a timely posting, given our housebound lives during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic shut-down. Many people are getting around to long-neglected home projects! This essay was first published in On The Town (Grand Rapids, Michigan), in 2000.
When I was a kid, there was always something I thought I needed. My birthday and Christmas were harvest days. Later, when I could earn my own money, I realized with joy that I could accumulate things all by myself. When I bought a dish drainer, some pots and pans, silverware and plates and glasses to outfit my first apartment, the checker whistled and said, “looks like someone’s setting up a household.” What a feeling of pride and maturity swept over me!
Of course, that first apartment led to another, then others, as jobs and circumstances changed. At first, I could easily move my stuff in my beat-up secondhand station wagon. Later, the boxes and growing collection of furniture filled a friend’s pickup truck. Finally, I bought my first house. It was tiny, only 800 square feet – but to me, it was a castle. By then, it took a few trips to move my stuff.
In the next ten years, I accumulated not only my own stuff, but also a partner and all his stuff. When it came time to move again, reality hit: so much stuff had drifted into our life in dribs and drabs that we realized we’d either have to break our (aging) backs, or call a moving company. Shocking.
I know I’m not alone. In fact, this nation is facing a “stuff crisis.” We are filling our lives with it, letting the siren call of the mall draw us in, like overdrawn sailors on the high seas of commerce. Does it ever end? Are we possessed by an addiction to stuff?
Treasures and trinkets. The sideboard from grandfather’s house. That new dress you had to have (last year, worn twice). Another necktie from the kids. Piles of projects, halfstarted, in the margins of the living room, the dining room, the garage, the basement. Artwork by your now-grown kindergartner. Books, everywhere, and magazines. Summer stuff. Winter stuff. Stuff you definitely intend to get around to using, someday. It’s there, in your space, sometimes used, often loved, all collecting dust.
Certainly, there are blessings attached to having stuff. It’s actually a nice problem to have. There are plenty of people in the world who do not have much stuff at all. But focusing, for now, on those with too much, such abundance can leave you feeling as over-stuffed as a Thanksgiving night stomach.
Yes, abundance is a blessing - and a curse. I have a head start over my contemporaries because both my parents died young, leaving their stuff to me and my brother. The houses they lived in were filled not only with their stuff, but also with the stuff their parents left them. My experience will be repeated often as other baby boomers come into their legacies in coming years. The stuff crisis is a looming national disaster. It’s like rising flood waters, gradually creeping up the banks of the river of life. Someday, many of us will wake up and find ourselves drowning in stuff.
One way to separate which stuff really deserves to stay or not is to take a step back from the inevitably-attached emotions. For example, when my mom died, the dining room table and chairs that had supported our family meals while I grew up came to me. I placed it in my home without really thinking about it. Of course I should want it! Of course it belonged with us, where it could frame my child’s growing-up memories of family meals. But one day, I looked at it and realized something startling: I did not want that dining room set. It didn’t fit the space, it didn’t fit these times, and it didn’t fit who I have become as a woman, separate from that little girl who was forever being reminded to remove her elbows from that tabletop.
What had happened was that a treasure had become a burden. Something which once meant a lot lost its meaning when I took time to see it objectively. When I assessed my volumes of stuff with a critical eye, I realized that much of what I thought I so sorely needed had come home only to take up space.
Around that time, a phrase entered my mind which has been very helpful. Whispering gently at the edge of my overwhelmed mind, it said, “Love it, honor it -- and let it go.” I did love that dining room set, for the wonderful memories it held for me. So I decided to honor the memory, but let the items go.
The table and chairs didn’t go far. They went to my brother. In the context of discussing stuff, his circumstances add a whole new dimension. A middle-aged bachelor, he lives in England. I haven’t been around him much since childhood, so I was in for a real surprise when I finally had a chance to visit his home there. It was immediately and abundantly evident that my brother is a first-rate pack-rat. He has filled every spare cubic inch of his lovely English cottage with...stuff! Having been through the process of clearing out the homes of dead parents, I know I never want the task of emptying his house. Thus we have initiated a running joke: simply, he has to die last. That’s it. I’m not going overseas to take care of things there. (In the time-honored phraseology of siblings, I say, “So there!”)
My brother is apparently unable to give up much of anything, so he seems to be collecting dining room furniture. He keeps it at my father’s house in Connecticut, which, he also couldn’t bear to let go of and to which he returns several times annually. There, he has the 16-foot solid oak dining table that graced our family’s dining rooms on my father’s side for several generations. When a cousin decided she couldn’t keep our grandmother’s lovely dining set (table, 12 chairs), my brother took it. When I decided I didn’t want the modest dining set we grew up with, my brother actually paid me to rent a truck and drive it to the east coast. Three dining sets in the same house – and he lives an ocean away!
After much thought about stuff, and its role in my life, plus after several years of making a conscious effort to decide rationally whether or not I really need it, I’ve discovered that there’s much I can do without. That stuff which starts to feel like a burden finds itself in the give-away box.
Just as a gardener weeds carrot shoots to give room for good carrots to grow large enough to eat, a homeowner can “weed” stuff that, once wanted, has become a burden. Like the carrots, where every shoot has the potential to be a delicious treat, m uch of the stuff in our lives also has great potential. Think of all that stuff in your home that “gosh, I better hang onto – I might need that someday!” But when there’s so much stuff that you begin to feel as if you’re drowning, you have to ask who’s in charge? Me? Or my stuff? When stuff threatens to overtake your whole world, it’s hard to enjoy. If, instead, you take time before a purchase to say, “yes, this is one addition to my stuff that I will truly value,” then the accumulation can be more conscious and deliberate, thus more meaningful.
And what about those things that you are given, such as family treasures and other special things? I hope every person has some treasures. I have, for example, a lovely pin. I don’t tend to wear pins, but I treasure this one because my brother gave it to me for Christmas, and it’s beautiful. It’s one treasure which is here to stay.
Burdens? Or treasures? That’s what the stuff in our lives boils down to. Much of it is actually stuff we want. If you love it, then keep it. But a lot of it is just... there. Don’t let it get the upper hand. The stuff in your life should be there to serve you, not the other way around. It’s ok to send it to the thrift shop, or throw it away. That’s good, healthy weeding. Love it, honor it – then let it go.