Lighten the load

In a town where I once lived, there was a small business that offered services such as cleaning up houses and yards, as well as removing and hauling away unwanted items. The name of the business was “Lighten Your Load.” I think that the name is inspired because it captures an important benefit of getting rid of things we really don’t need. All of the possessions that fill our lives often are a burden that interferes with how we live, taking up time, money, and space. Scientists say that the species most closely related to humans is the chimpanzee. I wonder if instead it might be the dung beetle. Just as that insect rolls its ball of dung through life, so we roll our huge ball of possessions through our own life. Or, as with poor Sisyphus, we roll that ball of possessions up the hill day after day, condemned not for deceitfulness as he was, but rather as punishment for our own acquisitiveness.

We certainly are an affluent society, and the amount of our possessions is a first-world luxury. Some upper middle class houses have closets the size of bedrooms in other countries. Our garages are so full of things that there is no room for cars, and storage units proliferate like mange on a stray dog. Rather than discriminate on what is truly important, we simply try to have it all. We suffer from a poverty of affluence manifested by our preoccupation with our possessions. In “Walden,” Thoreau famously said, “…a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”  By that measure we are a poor society, indeed.

Costco is an example of our acquisitiveness, encouraged by our fascination with bargains and buying in bulk. I am not a Costco member and the only time I have been in one or the stores in recent years was to accompany an elderly woman to an appointment to buy a hearing aid, as part of my volunteer work. On that trip I was appalled at seeing customers with shopping carts the size of small SUVs hauling huge amounts of marginally useful crap across the ten-acre parking lot. Nope, I think life is too short to shop at Costco just to save a few bucks on things I can mostly do without or don’t want to buy in truckload quantities. Moreover, I’m not sure I’m even mentally stable enough to bear the experience.

An interesting example of the tendency to accumulate possessions is collecting. I have known several collectors in my life: people who accumulate things like fountain pens, watches, or even more unusual objects such as that of an acquaintance who focuses on furoshiki, the wrappings used for gifts by Samurai warriors. Collecting can be an interesting activity, for example people who like stamps or coins—or something that has grown from a different hobby, as camera collecting sometimes does from photography. Collecting is usually a benign endeavor, but it can become almost a disease when it grows to consume large amounts of time, money, or space, an infirmity I have seen occasionally, especially among gun collectors. The novel, “The Connoisseur,” by Evan Connell is a fascinating story of a man who becomes so addicted to collecting pre-Columbian figurines that it takes over his life. It is a cautionary tale that any would-be collector should consider reading.

Of course, when collectors die, their survivors have to dispose of the collection.  I call that challenge the widow’s burden, even though the survivor is as likely to be a husband or adult child. That burden is not just a responsibility that falls on a family getting rid of a collector’s accumulation. It is one that any next of kin faces in disposing of things that were often cherished by the deceased, ordinary objects like fishing gear, tools, or golf clubs, or sometimes unusual things such as the half-built airplane I found in the basement of a widow for whose estate I was the executor. Even greater is the challenge often faced by heirs or executors who have to dispose of an entire house of possessions—furniture, clothing, dishes, etc. There are businesses whose focus is taking on that duty by holding “Estate Sales,” weekend events in which a house is opened and the dead person’s possessions laid bare for the general public to pick through and consider purchasing to add to their own larder.  I occasionally visit estate sales, not to buy anything but to observe the spectacle and consider what might become of my own dearest possessions. 

I think there are several reasons that we have so much stuff in our lives. Advertising is an obvious cause. It not only drives our wants but creates them. We are inundated in advertising to the extent that our identity as citizen has been supplanted by that of consumer. We spend more time searching for the best gizmo to buy than how to vote in elections. We have become anesthetized by things, pretty baubles that hold us in thrall. Also, for many people, there seems to be a lack of something in their lives that leaves them feeling incomplete, and possessions help overcome that lack. In this consumerist society, we conflate the pursuit of happiness with acquiring things. Or perhaps the things we own provide comfort and security from the uncertainties of the world. It is as though some of us look out on the world from the bunker of our possessions.

When my wife and I decided to leave San Francisco more than two decades ago, we put all of our possessions in storage, sold our house, and traveled around the West for nearly six months in an old motor home, investigating potential places to where we might move. The process of sorting and storing our possessions was a satisfying way to purge items we no longer needed or wanted from our lives. If the effort weren’t so difficult, I think it would be useful to do that every five years or so.

I am going through a similar sorting process right now. I am not preparing to move but rather getting ready to die. It is not that I have a terminal diagnosis, not at all. I have no idea how long I will live. I am closing in on 80, however, and given mortality statistics, I realize that my days are numbered, even though I don’t know what that number is. I have three goals in sorting through my possessions now. First, I want to save my heirs the hassle of disposing of items they don’t want and the challenge of dividing up the ones they do. Second, I want to avoid having hordes of greedy strangers walk through my home in search of bargains, treasures, or stuff to peddle themselves. Third, and most important, I want to distill my life to rid myself of objects that are no longer relevant—that I am no longer interested in or that I will never use again, and which have become a burden or a distraction. I believe that this act of discarding will give me more freedom to focus my time and attention on things that are important to me now rather than in the past. In many ways, I am a different person than I was 10, 20, or 50 years ago, so I am casting off the possessions of the person I no longer am. Further, I want to take care of that duty now rather than wait until I am forced to by a final illness. Part of hospice volunteer training I attended in 1993 included a “Dying Exercise,” which I still recall clearly after more than thirty years. It offered some insight at how our perspectives change by necessity in the final stages of our life. I wrote about it on turn-stone: https://turnstonecom.wpcomstaging.com/what-is-important-in-life.

Finally, I think the idea of lightening one’s load applies to more than just possessions. Just as some of our possessions lose their significance over time, especially as we age and become more aware that our life is finite, so do other aspects of our nature: our desires, our assumptions, our biases and worldview, our expectations for ourselves and others, etc. By understanding and accepting that our attitudes change, we can slough off ways of thinking that are no longer relevant along with the burdens they place on us. By doing so, we can achieve a measure of contentment.