“There is a time to keep and a time to throw away.”
—Ecclesiastes 3:6
By a month from today, I’ll be living in another city. Or I will be if I can manage to get me, my family, the critters, and all our stuff into boxes or cars, or both, and drive 900 miles to get there. And find a place for all our stuff.
We have a lot of stuff. We’ve lived in this house for seven years now. It’s our first house, and we wondered how we would ever manage to fill it with furniture when we moved in. That’s not a problem now. We even have a rented storage space where we keep our books, and bookshelves. Our kitchen table is there too. We’ve run out of room for our stuff.
People say that if you can do without something for a year you don’t need it anymore. I suppose that’s as true as a proverb gets, but let them try and get between me and my boxed up books.
We were pretty disciplined about making regular runs to Goodwill when it was next door to the grocery store. Now that it moved miles away and we don’t see it all the time, we don’t think about gathering up a pile of stuff to haul over. Out of sight, out of mind. And the stuff keeps piling up.
Some of the stuff is easy to get rid of. The clothes we don’t wear anymore can go to Goodwill. The baby stuff too, or we could put out an email to the infant group at church. The philosophy books? Anyone who would want them already has them. You can’t pay somone to take them on Amazon, and you can forget about selling them to your local used bookstore. They’d stay on the shelf for years.
Once I get moved, I’ll carefully put them in just the right order on my own bookshelves, and then they’ll stay on those shelves for years. I tell myself from time to time that I’ll open them up again and have a good read. I tell myself that, but I know it’s not true. I don’t keep them because I want to read them again. Not most of them.
Stuff carries meaning. Sometimes the meaning is inherent, like with a wedding photo. Other times it’s because of marketing—or starts with marketing—like with the Star Wars toys I keep in the attic. Whatever meaning our stuff starts out with, we add to it, with experiences and memories. It will be a proud day when I hand over those Star Wars toys to my son.
My simplicity-pietist friends will tell me I should not be so attached to my stuff. Or at least that’s how it starts off. Usually, with only a little digging, the simplicity-pietists will reveal that that you should be attached to the right stuff, produced by the right people in the right way, which is often stuff I can’t afford. Or won’t. I’m not going to go without iPhone apps so I can be somebody else’s idea of a good liberal.
Purging digital stuff isn’t any easier. My hard drive is getting close to full. I have a habit of buying two or three new albums every month. One of those might be a keeper. But I might like the songs I haven’t sorted into playlists yet, if I just have the time and inclination to give them a second, uninterrupted listen. If I toss them, I won’t be able to do that.
It’s not just the opportunity cost. Part of the joy of stuff, of collections of stuff, is looking through it all. I have a couple of shelves stacked full of CDs that I’ll no doubt be moving with me even though they’re all ripped to my laptop and backed up on a spare hard drive. Giving them up would mean never looking at them again, never holding that CD that pulls up that memory. Why would I want to get rid of that?
There have been times when purging has come easily, if a little too easily. I regret the time I purged my old sheet music, which was sitting harmlessly enough inside the piano bench in my parents’ home, not seeing the light of day. I secretly hope that my mother followed along behind me when I wasn’t looking and took them out of the trash, and that they’re there waiting for me in a box in the attic. It’s a good thing the piano is heavy, or I might have purged it along with the sheet music.
Life comes in seasons, and seasons carry with them certain stuff. It’s why there are decade-themed parties and high school yearbooks. The urge to keep or to throw away is never far from our feelings about the seasons of life that our stuff is attached to. It may not be spiritually correct to say so, but a little bit of hoarding ain’t such a bad thing. It’s no good trying to throw away a season of your life.
(Photo by Calamity Meg. Used under Creative Commons license.)