Stuff

Last weekend, we had a good clearout and took a lot of stuff to a car boot sale. It left me strangely unsettled to bag and box up the accumulated clutter of years, take it to a different place, unbag and unbox it again, put a totally arbitrary price on each item, and then see a part of your life slowly trickle away as each item is added to the clutter of other people's lives instead.

You spend the first half of your life acquiring, collecting and slowly accumulating all kinds of objects, shoring up your own corner of the universe of things with fragments to give yourself some solidity, substance, identity. Then, when you get to a stage of your life where you feel you have reached that state of independent personhood where you no longer need material possessions to bolster your sense of self (if you ever get there...), you can't wait to eject the detritus of the life you built up during all those years.

When my parents moved from their flat to an old people's home last year, my sister and I spent three hours inspecting and grading the stuff they had left behind so we could decide what to do with it. In the end, we kept almost none of it. My parents had already said goodbye to it all, had no further need for it in their new place. And even though some of it resonated with both of us because it had been with us when we were growing up, we also realised, with some sadness, that in the end it was all really a load of old tat.

I find books the hardest to get rid of. Like many readers, I experience a book to the full, I love the feel of it, the smell of the printed paper (each book subtly different from any other), but mostly the thoughts and feelings that each book evokes when reading it. I can often recall the whole feel of a holiday through remembering which book I was reading at the time. So to me a book captures a whole experience, a sense of time and place, as well as what story it has to tell.  A book, and by extension, any other things that have such a keenly felt presence in our lives, becomes a repository to anchor a particular set of thoughts, emotions, perceptions, place, time, weather, whatever.

We must learn how to preserve those experiences whilst at the same time letting go of that physical shell that contains them, that book, that record, picture or object. That way we can fight the tyranny of things and keep our lives pure and simple. In the end, all things are just stuff...