Downsizing

I read a really good tip on a decluttering website recently.  They said that if you have things that are precious to you that  you keep stored and seldom take out to see or to use, you should consider taking a photograph of the items and hanging them on the wall or putting them in a scrapbook (digital or otherwise).  If the items aren’t things you’d want framed on your wall (or somewhere out where you can see them every day), then they’re  probably not as important as you thought they were.  So all those bronzed baby shoes of mine that my grandfather made for me (he was an electroplater) will have to get photographed, I guess.  I would like to have some evidence of their existence, but I don’t really need them or even really want them all that much.  I want what they represent….proof of my connection to a family, proof of my babyhood, a time in my life that I can’t remember and no one can tell me about because they are gone.  I wish I still had a good SLR so I could take decent shots of things like that, but my little digital camera will have to do.

Not having progeny makes some of these decisions easier.  I don’t have the excuse that I’m keeping stuff that I think my kids one day might want.  No one will want it.  The stuff only has meaning to me, and that meaning will evaporate when I do.  I know that sounds morbid, but the idea requires me to live in the moment, to be more present.  In the now, Lex and I have a rather exciting, scary opportunity to try something completely different with our lives, and I have to measure whether that opportunity is more important than a few pairs of bronzed baby shoes and some Christmas ornaments.

When I taught high school, I always did a Holocaust unit in my classes  We would discuss how, when people were rounded up and moved into the ghettos, they were allowed to take one small suitcase, and we discussed what that meant, how hard it must have been for people to choose.  I would give students a little handout with the outline of a suitcase on it, and I would ask them to write on it what they would take with them.  Inevitably, students would think this was more a figurative than literal exercise, so I’d have to explain that their cars, girlfriends, TVs, and dogs probably wouldn’t fit in the small suitcase.  They would have to make some choices.  They had to assume they would be starting over with nothing, so they would need the essentials.  The only thing that made the exercise tolerable for my students was that it was hypothetical (and ungraded).  They didn’t like the idea of parting from the familiar.

For us, this act of choosing is no longer a hypothetical exercise.  Admittedly, we get to take more than a small suitcase and the Nazis aren’t sending us to Auschwitz, but we are starting over, and we have limited room, even for the essentials.  Trinkets become excess baggage.  While sorting through that baggage is difficult, it’s also freeing.  We are becoming mindful not only of how much “things” have meant to us, how much illusory comfort they have provided, but also of how much it means to us to be able to put some of these things aside, knowing we will, in fact, survive without them.   I’m reminded of Tim O’Brien’s _The Things They Carried_.  The soldiers’ entire existence was crammed into their packs. Like a great, lumbering turtle, so will our life be crammed into a fiberglass shell and toted with us wherever we go.