Stuff

I've had an interesting relationship with stuff over the past year, as many of you know. Many people have asked me about it with questions like “what is is like having to decide what to keep and what to let go?” and “how did you decide?” I'd like to muse about that for awhile.

My thoughts and reactions are not what I would have expected. Much of my life has been focused on collecting things. Not necessarily expensive things. I guess more often than not, I'd lean toward things that were unique or out of the ordinary. I quite enjoyed scaling back and discarding things that hadn't really been used much. We had a lot of space and that space collected a lot of stuff that was kept just in case it would be needed. My auto mechanic told me that his rule of thumb was: if you haven't used it in 5 years, face it, it's more trouble than it's worth.

There's the natural desire to protect one's things. I'd curiously read accounts of disasters wondering how I would cope if one day I'd lose everything in a fire, for example. The recent accounts of hurricanes and floods remind us that our stuff could be gone in a moment. After much consideration, I still have to say that the inventorying and decision making felt good. The letting go and the giving away and the recycling routinely resulted in a feeling of lightness and relief. Surely, I understand that I had the power to hold on to what I wanted, so there was not a sense of losing things without my control or permission. I still have my fiddle. My backpack. My bluejeans. I have on my keychain nowadays: my eigth grade school ring, my highschool senior ring, my grandmother's wedding ring. Oh, and some nailclippers and a whistle.

Then, during the same time frame, I became responsible for dealing with my mother's stuff. She was in the position of involuntarily giving up a life's worth of possessions. I was in the position of trying to choose what most meaningful things could fit into one room for a memory impaired person. Her last words to me as I left for Australia were “what about my clothes that were in the closet?”

All of her clothes, by the way, were with her or packed away for her, except for things that didn't fit her. So, in a sense, she'd lost things that she actually still had. She just can't remember that she has them.

One of the things that is striking about downsizing possessions is their perceived worth, or monetary value. Much of our stuff was sold for a song. Much of our stuff was given away. Yeah, yeah, yeah, many people told me to sell things on Ebay. You might think I'd radiate toward that sort of solution, but I just couldn't deal with learning one more thing or organizing one more logistic like shipping my stuff to other people. I was trying to work out details of shipping my stuff to me on the other side of the world, and didn't want to muddy up that water with facts about how to ship stuff to Ebayers. At this late date, we still have my old desk at a consignment shop, now down to 160 some bucks and unsold.

Rather than drive my gas sucking SUV into the Hudson River, I had to let it go for $3500. And, I'm happy that it went for that. Forget Kelly Blue Book estimates on those things.

I asked for a high price for my mandolin, unconsciously hoping that it wouldn't sell and I'd have to figure out how to get it to Tasmania. That being the case, I had to cut my own custom sized box for it. Still waiting.

Still waiting for 8 boxes of clothes, toiletries, shoes, some pictures, recordings of festival jams, music books, extra glasses, silly knick-knacks, political buttons, jewelry, belts.

Still waiting for 1 big box that Liz shipped, and the post office accepted, before we discovered there was a size limit.

Still waiting for a box that I shipped from Vancouver, jettisoning stuff that I thought I might use on the trip over. Art supplies, mini-disc recorder, tour books, some clothes.

Still waiting for the custom size box with a mandolin, sneakers, pillow, some odd bits of clothing as padding. But even though we're still waiting, and I'm wishing for some of the stuff in the boxes, I am quite satisfied with my day-to-day life here. My lack of stuff is not causing any real hardship.

Not still waiting for the box with our phone and router that I'd shipped insured and quickly. You may have already read my whine about how the customs folks trashed the router. The update is that Vonage revealed their fine print, and the phone probably can't be used in Australia after all. Argh. Catching the irony here? The only box that we go so far is the box with stuff we can't use.

Not waiting for the small crate of stuff in storage that we wanted to keep for the future. Photos, kitchenware, cookbooks, some clothes, bedding, keepsakes, vacuum cleaner. As I sit here trying to remember what's in that crate, I'm coming up short. But, I know we'll have some fun opening it up and seeing what we thought we couldn't leave behind.

Some of our furnishings and household goods we gave to Ben. It was a very good feeling to see my houseplants thriving in the large windows of his apartment. And, to know that he likes the odd pillar made from wood. And, just to know that we could pass stuff along just at the time he'd moved into a bigger apartment.

I liked being able to give some stuff away. My cousin left our house one day with a few bags of CD's. What the heck, we gave her the CD rack for her birthday present. Ben and Nat have some of the collection. My fiddler friends have some. Janet, in particular, wants to just hold on to some old timey CD's so that other folks can borrow them. And, someday she hopes to give them back to me.

I broke down and got some more socks today. Tired of wearing my 3 pairs for the past 2 months. There's a good chance I'll hit some second hand stores this week, too, and see if there's some clothes that I can wear while I wait for my 'real' clothes to get here. This philosophical discussion about stuff should not ignore the fact that I don't have to go to work. So, there's a whole category of stuff that I don't need. I love not having a car and all the associated car expenses. I do have work clothes coming in one of those boxes, but only so that I'll have them next time I have to jump back into the work force.

People ask “Is there anything that you miss?” The answer is tempered with the fact that we're finding Tasmania to be well worth what we had to do to get here. I suppose if it was the pits, I'd be moaning more. But, there's very little stuff that I actually miss or feel like I can't do without. I miss my music stand. I'll have to find another here. I miss a shelf full of seasonings, but it's kind of fun to collect new ones and to punt in the kitchen. I have a collection of seedlings out of the balcony. I don't miss my greenhouse.

I probably miss you, unless you're some stranger that just tripped into this blog.

Well, enough about me. What about your stuff? Drop me a line, eh?