On Downsizing And The Removal Of Things

 In having my weekly chat with Uisdean Ruadh last night, I asked him how the pre-move was going.  Hard, he replied.

Perhaps coming as no surprise, he is downsizing his life in preparation for what (likely) will be a smaller living space and shared with his mother.  He has a storage locker but of course that is not enough for the accoutrements of over 50 years of living and at least 30 of living on his own.  And so he is processing his items now.

He has made trips to the Goodwill bringing books he realizes he will no longer read and things he will no longer use.  He will have to the same thing again, of course, when he moves his mother, but has already begun to assess what he is bringing from her apartment and what needs to go.

His pain is real.  He has spent the last 15 years building up a life and a place that reflected him and comforted him and in some ways protected him from a world that has not always done him right, and now he is having to rip it apart on a timeclock.

I sympathized and told him so - after all, here we are over a year after my parents left their home and yet I am still slowly getting around to removing things, my issue being much the same as his - that these have sentimental value beyond their simple existence; they are things that reflect not just themselves but my parents that bought them.

Although, I pointed out to him, in reality it is just a forerunner of the way life works.

My parents, in their current living situation, have precisely nothing that they owned except their wedding rings.  They are always nicely dressed when we see them, but the clothes are never ones that we recognize or originally sent them with.  The material possessions of 60 years of married life, of working and saving and searching things out and preserving, are all now longer in their lives.  To be honest, I suspect they do not remember the great majority of them ever existed.

Why, then, do I cling so fiercely to my own things?

I am no different than Uisdean Ruadh or, I suspect, the majority of people.  Not only have I spent a live collecting things that in many cases serve no purpose other than as a happy memory or to remind me of something, I continue to pursue some level of things (to a lesser extent than I used to, but still).  Were our positions reversed, I would be going through the exact same anguish that he is.  I can somehow pretend, in the absence of having to make a decision, that I could do it - but who am I kidding?  Myself, mostly.

So why am I not preparing myself for this now?

There are two tracks, of course. The first is simply to acquire less.  The question I am asking more and more is "Do I really, really need this"?  Some things, like shoes, I do.  Some things, like books, I do not not (although in an interesting twist, I am now reclaiming Nighean Dhonn's books as she is done with them).  My list of books has grown much shorter and is much more around the specific things that I want to study.

The other track is "get rid of it".  This is harder, oddly enough.  I am one of those people that infuses inanimate objects with emotion and feeling.  Which makes them harder to get rid of. However, as I have continued to come to my parents, I may have found the key to that as well:  simply put them out of sight.  When you come across something you have not seen in months (or even years), ask "Do I really still need this"?  If I have not used it or thought of it in months, likely not.

The reality - for all of us - is that at some point there will be a time where we can take none of it with us, be it through having to move to a place where we cannot have it or by dying, where we can never take it.  Best, at least for me, to work harder on this process now.