3:00 snapshot #763

[urbpan]

Can you believe that we aren't totally out of our old place yet? Last night we dragged out a bunch of furniture to the sidewalk for today's yard sale (the whole street has a big yard sale once a year). I can't fully express how painful the experience of moving is for me. Here we are months later, and I still go into this place every couple of weeks and shuffle boxes around, find papers and objects that are heavy with sentiment and meaning, maybe throw out a bag of stuff, and leave feeling sad and depressed. It's a mental illness I'm sure, to be so attached to material things, but without them how would we know that we lived a life? How can I remember that people love me without notes written on paper? How can I prove what I was doing ten, fifteen, twenty years ago--that I was expressive and engaged, that my personality is what I pretend it is? Part of me wants to dispose of it all without even looking at it, to be purely who I am now and prove to myself that I'm worthwhile without piles of dusty papers and once beloved trinkets. But part of me wants to preserve it all as a museum of who I was, and the time and place where I lived, in case that ever becomes important.

Comments

[lizziebelle.livejournal.com]

I've found that the older I get, the less attachment I have to that sort of thing. Which is just the opposite of what I expected. I started a massive clean-out last summer, and it was surprisingly easy to let go of quite a bit. I haven't missed any of it, either.

The hard part, really, is getting started. Once you get past that hurdle, it gains a momentum of its own. I highly recommend it. :)

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the hard part is the stuff that I had the attachment to when I was younger. I find it and think, oh that poor boy thought this was important to save! It wouldn't be right to throw it out after he'd kept it all this time.

[ndozo.livejournal.com]

That sucks. An organized person I met had taken binders and sheet protectors and put all his letters and ephemera from the past in them. I was impressed. Dumpster? Stimulants? A couple of friends and I are helping each other go through our stuff and our dead relatives' stuff. Having another person there can help break the spell. Actually it sounded like you had a great system, one that has worked for me many times; Put stuff in the basement, basement floods, stuff gets wrecked, throw stuff away. Good luck. Keep focused and go forward, eventually it'll be over. Sorry it's rough.

Dumpster? Stimulants?

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

My method is time consuming. It would be better to use a garden hose and just soak all those things in the old apartment, then use a pitchfork to huck it all out the window.

Re: Dumpster? Stimulants?

[ndozo.livejournal.com]

I laughed.

[buboniclou.livejournal.com]

That's such a great articulation of it. It's exactly how I feel about "stuff" too :(

[urb-banal.livejournal.com]

"that my personality is what I pretend it is"

Wow, that says it all huh? Very insightful and something we all suffer over.

I had a zen monk tell me once, "You aren't who you think you are." and it wasn't the usual "Yeah you aren't so hot" or "yeah you ARE GREAT" or anything like that. It was that no matter how much I THOUGHT about it I could not be who I am by thinking about it.

When we infuse things with meaning beyond mere usefulness we need give them places of prominance in our homes. I think that is the best way to avoid mere hoarding or heaping or cluttering up. There can only be so many places of prominance. Still, making a box for letters, or displaying items with purpose can be useful.

I have a ceramic lawn Knome Buddha bought at a garden store that sits in my Butsudan (in this case a shelf with wheels where I burn incense). I know I am not "bowing to Buddha" or to the lawn knome but to my conscious effort to wake up as a human being. I make room for it in my office because it reflects my practice but it is not my practice, it will never be my practice.

When I remember I remember in the here and now, even what I would rather forget.

At one point I needed to talk to someone about my grief and galling loss. It helped. The important thing, for me, was to allow for it, to not bury myself or hide in the refuse. I didn't think it would help me but it did.

[roaming.livejournal.com]

Humans make meaning. It's liberating to decide how much and what kind of meaning to ascribe to anything. I feel the way you do about stuff. And I spend waaaaay too much time organizing and shuffling and unshuffling and thinking about my stuff. It's beginning to bug me, the way my stuff runs me. Who's in charge here, anyway?!?!?!

So yeh, I get it. I'm inching toward the hose and dumpster method. Because I have boxes of saved papers and I know for sure if they disappeared overnight I wouldn't have a single clue what was in them that I'd 'lost."