The Things We Carefully Pack

The past week has been occupied with an onerous chore that seems to have no end: moving.  My roommate and I have been hauling several car-loads full of furniture, boxes of books, and random odds and ends from a second-floor apartment to a house.  There is no better exercise to teach one just how much stuff one has.  My clothes alone took up five large suitcases, and that’s not including the pieces I used as padding for fragile knickknacks.  I wouldn’t consider myself a hoarder, by any means, but our culture teaches us to surround ourselves with things.

Now, I could argue that I need most of these objects.  My clothes of course are necessary, as well as the twenty-five pairs of shoes I own.  Without my (large) desk, where would I sit to work?  Without my journals from the past twelve years, how would I remember my own development as a writer?  And of course I can’t throw away that file of old work—someone might be interested in it when I become famous one day.  That book of recipes I’ve copied by hand will someday be a family heirloom, though I certainly don’t plan on learning to cook any better than I do now.  Okay, yes, that stuffed yellow camel doesn’t fulfill any purpose to make my life better, but I won him in my first year of college, and isn’t he cute?

You get the idea.  We often make excuses for our things, because we get strangely attached to them.  Most often, though, our stuff is valued either because of its connection to the past, or its hope for the future, sometimes both.  Chairs that belonged to my grandmother, a fan that I bought on my first trip abroad, glasses given to me by my best friend—all of these things somehow make me feel less alone.  They remind me of people who love me, or pieces of myself that I might have forgotten.

I am lucky in that most of the things I own do have these associations tied to them.  They make me happy, and that is a perfect excuse to make the trouble to move them seven miles down the road.  You don’t really have too much stuff until you look around at what surrounds you and realize that most of it has no meaning, none of those fond shadows of memories attached.  When you own to possess, and not to appreciate, that is when you should think about cutting back.

Look around.  How many of the things you look at make you think of someone else, or of something that happened to you or others?  How many of your things have purpose to them, and how many are just taking up space in your room?