When I was ten years old, my family took a trip across country, from Ohio to Southern California. First we were visiting for six months, then my dad got a job offer and we moved there. But first, we drove back to Ohio to take three months packing up the house, selling it, saying goodbye and finally heading west for good - going across the USA for the third time in nine months. We camped all three times - the second trip, in early summer, became a three-week vacation, and we visited many National Parks (Grand Canyon, Bryce, Zion, Carlsbad Caverns, Rocky Mountain, Mesa Verde and so on). I remember these as good times, and there are a lot of family stories from this period. One of the things we did was get into family in-jokes, many of them plays on language; my family is really smart and know how to have fun, and so we can do wordplay fairly well (my dad is King of Bad Puns).
Because we were camping, there was a lot of stuff to cart around - sleeping bags and camp stoves and coolers and so on. My dad started staying - pick up your stuff, move that stuff, bring your stuff here. Us kids began to notice and then mock his over-usage of the word "stuff." I even bought a dog hand puppet to amuse myself in the way back, and named him Stuff. At that point, my father said, "That's it! No more stuff." After that, it was "Please bring these items to your mother" or "Where is the cooking paraphernalia?" but never did he say "stuff" again. At least, that is how I remember it.
I think back on this incident for a few reasons. One, it's summer time, and in a way, that was my most memorable summer. Kids love summer - when I was a kid, it was because I didn't have to go to school, which I was good at but did not actually like. When I was an adult, I looked back on all of childhood as if it was one long summer, because school now seemed like summer, i.e. meaning times I did not have to work. I'd rather go to school that work, but there you are - I did not know that when I was a kid, and therefore did not properly appreciate the summers off that I had. However, this year, I've had these 12 weeks off, from Memorial Day until mid-August, a summer if there ever was, and it's been glorious. More about that later.
The second reason I think of the stuff incident is because that is what a great deal of my summer has been taken up with: dealing with stuff. Stuff of ALL sorts - for the most part, I mean what my dad meant: all that crap that needs to be moved, put away, taken out, etc. In my case, since I'm now an adult with a house instead of a kid in a pop-up camper, it's not stoves and sleeping bags I move around but books, clothes, electronics and the like. (Actually, today I happened to be tacking the hall closet and I did in fact move my sleeping bag but that's not usual).
I have too much stuff. It's not a unique problem in America - or San Francisco, where the average living space is just smaller. Mostly, I have media: books (a small library at this point, which I love), CDs and DVDs, magazines (oh, the stack of unread New Yorkers!) and such. Also, clothes, including costumes; the Dickens Faire outfits alone means hoop skirts and petticoats, not really low-profile items when it comes to space - and then also fabric to make more costumes. Related to that is yarn and other textiles which brings me to art supplies, also abundant. Then there's the personal journals - shelves of them, and what's to be done about that? There's no throwing those out, but digitizing them is a titanic project and I have a hard enough time trying to find time to fill more of them.
Plus, all the other flotsam and jetsam of life: candles, sunglasses, vacuum cleaners, board games, pillowcases and all of that; it exists and must go somewhere. Don't get me started on whole other categories, like ephemera (paper stuff: bills, maps, plans, brochures, tickets, programs, receipts - that stuff that makes you feel like you are in the Matrix), and digital "stuff" (just because it's not taking up physical space doesn't mean it's not taking up head space and personal energy), and spiritual aids, like Tibetan Singing Bowls and divination decks and so on, of which I have probably too many but don't want to give any of them up.
And therein lies the problem: I don't want to give any of it up. Why? Because I either use it enough currently to justify its presence in my house OR (and this is a big "or") I hope to become the kind of person soon who WILL use that item enough in the future to justify its presence. Clutter is just hope in disguise. In other words, if I toss those art supplies, my brain says and my heart feels that there goes the hope that I will EVER get into making visual art. Which I very much want to do. Unfortunately, I very much want to do many things.
More, in fact, than I am beginning to suspect I ever can. I think often of a quote from organizational guru David Allen (the Getting Things Done guy), who said: "You can do anything, but not everything." I heard that one about a decade ago and it's still sinking in. I know that life is, many ways, about choices, and priorities. And like it or not, what we own - just like what we do - tells a story about our choices and priorities. Those choices I've made and priorities I apparently operate under have been thrown into high relief as I've spent days and days working on my (and house) stuff: I've cleaned closets and drawers and the dark spaces under the built-in liquor cabinet. I even had to work on garden stuff, weeding this and planting that, for almost a week. I've hauled, sorted, tossed out, donated, dropped off, repaired, re-gifted, mailed, consumed or otherwise somehow disposed of a great deal of STUFF this summer. It's amazing how much could go.
Even more amazing: how much there is still left to do. This is tough to face on three levels, one being the sheer amount of time. I feel like, enough already! I can't spend any more life organizing stuff. The second is making the constant decisions. What the hell is more emotionally tiring than making decision after decision? Every shirt, towel, book has to be evaluated. Do I keep it, will I use it, when I did I use it last? It's exhausting. And then the third, deepest level, is dealing with what it all means. Each item isn't just itself, but has layers of meaning. Well, most of them do - tossing out the expired sunscreen is no problem, but I can experience whole periods of intense personal examination and questioning when confronted with, say, thinning out my jewelry, because of what it brings up.
Here's an example: I was able to bring myself to toss out (and in SF, that means "leave by curb until someone claims it as theirs") an zafu and zabutan. These are cushions typically used in sitting zazen, classic Zen meditation - but not used by me! I finally had to admit that I was not going to ever get to using them. I just wasn't. It's been X of years I've been meaning to get to it, and at some point, I have to accept it not happening, and move on. It's not always easy. Craft stuff was relatively painless - if I ever actually get to the point of making a red glass seed bead necklace, I will just go re-buy supplies then, but for now, someone at SCRAP can make good use of them. Thinking of the cost, by the way, of all of these items, is its own depressing meditation which I won't go into but you can plainly see where that line of thinking goes.
Other stuff, not so easy. I've got oodles of writing and mostly it's fragments but I'm a writer so no throwing those out (I'm digitizing those bit by bit). Then I'm a sucker for sentimental value and memorabilia, so that's a whole menu of pitfalls and difficult decisions. My mother passed away this summer - which I also hope to write about at length separately but it does play into my feelings about dealing with stuff. She was a crafts person and an artist, so I have all these handmade things from her - from pop up cards to knitted scarves - that I'm not sure what to do with. She made me things often that were not to my taste, and I will never use, and these used to be somewhat hard to get rid of but now, after her death, I come across one and I can't let it go. Because her death means, I now know that I have all of the stuff my mom will EVER make for me, all the birthday cards she will ever send. My mom's physical expression of her love for me is now a known, finite resource. I decided to just save it all to look at later; it's only been just two months so it's to early to deal with it.
Harder still was dealing with HER stuff, which I also had to do. Deciding what to keep was not hard - you keep the handmade quilts, obviously, and the poetry and pictures and grandpa's Bronze Star. But then, what to DO with these things? I have no kids and it's likely my one nephew won't reproduce and/or want any of this, so there's no easy answer of just keeping it for my kids (who presumably would keep it for their kids and their kids) so I have to think about it and I find myself getting into this weird state of just wondering what it's all about, anyway. Even if I did have kids, what good are heirlooms anyway, other to say, look, there's that heirloom of ours - and burden the kids with more stuff, from generations past that they can't get rid of. I mean, I can use my mom's quilts but there's no practical use for her high school yearbook. I start to get very existential about it and end up feeling doubtful about it all and ready to give up the notion of personal property altogether.
Unexpectedly, my mother's death and her leftover stuff was also instructive and, frankly, scary in a way I did not predict, which is it made me extremely aware of my own mortality. My mother was an incredible pack rat as well as a very creative person and she left behind many unfinished projects - fabric never sewn, yarn never knitted. She had a half-finished quilt, which I'm sure she did not start with any idea that she might not live to see it finished, but that is just what happened. Aside from the inevitable sadness sort of inherent in this subject, there's also the specific sadness of my mom and how she related to me and now, how I relate to stuff. I go through my house, my closet, my things, and I can't help but think: is this how I want to spend my time? By that I mean, not just that I don't want to spend more time on organization, but also, what about the time spent on using it all? Do I want to spend my time, ever, doing embroidery? I thought I did, but now I see I don't, so out all of that goes.
We all know the phrase life is short, but it's also always getting shorter. I used to have quite a few 20-year time periods left and now I don't. If I want to ever spend more than about 30 years doing something (like, say, playing the piano), and I don't already do it, I need to start RIGHT NOW. So it's not just that I am having to deal with admitting to parts of my personality that I wish were different (I am not someone who sits zazen, I'm facing it) but also realizing I have to make more choices about how I spend my time. If it takes me three hours to sew curtains, that's three hours out of the sum total of my life hours, and would I rather be doing something else with them? I mean, I realize that is not a very zen / flow / Alan Watts way of looking at time and things, but I can't help but think in those terms.
This consideration of time and how it's spent has been, I would say, the main project of my sabbatical, for which I had MANY goals, as I've written about. In the end, I maybe got to 8% of them - I either did it or started it. But the overarching one has been just understanding these concepts in a new way. My big goal was to discover what it was like to live as a human being in the world instead of some productive entity rushing somewhere and accomplishing something on an endless to do list, and in that sense, I feel I was successful. I did not spend ALL my time working on my stuff. There was the travel, and the social time and so on. But I also zoned out. A lot. I stared into space, in my garden. I lingered. I wandered. I browsed. I lazed. I took my time. If I sat down for breakfast and didn't feel like getting up when I was done but reading for 20 more minutes, that's what I did. And it has been WONDERFUL. I do indeed feel human again. Doing nothing is totally all its cracked up to be. There's time to think, and time to not think too.
But I didn't get to much else. So, the exercise routine, the novel about India, the ukulele recording sessions, the drawing and watercolor sessions, the sewing days, the learning how to cook days - that all did not happen. I have two weeks left so I know it's not gonna happen, either. Instead, I'm going to work on DECIDING what I want to do so that when I get back to working life (not "real life" because this is also real life), I will know what to do. I will have all those scattered desires gathered together a bit more, and sorted in my heart so I can better follow my bliss, as Joseph Campbell so wisely advises.
Because I do want that rich, full life. Yes, there's going to be pillowcases needing to be washed and folded and yes, there's going to be bills to pay, and yes, there's some amount of time you spend doing THAT stuff. But you need some of it. The last ten days have been focused on our living room remodel (remove stuff, paint room, pull up carpet, sand and finish the hardwood floors revealed, wait for stain to dry, put room back together); it was a real pain in the ass and I never want to do it again, but it's way better. My entire life will improve. So that's the whole thing - to make the amount of time one spends dealing with "stuff" (and you can read that as emotional, energetic baggage too) worth it.
As for what I did accomplish, I can only hope that it helps. That having all my ukulele music sorted will make it easier for me to play my uke. That having my pens, pencils and paints ready means I can take up art in the evenings after work because I won't need to spend 30 minutes tracking down what I want. Creating a space for me to sit and read that's comfortable and well-lighted will presumably increase my reading time. That's the idea, anyway. Who knows what I will actually do? This time off has been experimental, all about discovering WHAT I do when I have that much time; when the time off is over is what I will have the time to implement what I learned about who I am and what I want.
Anyway, I can now easily find my Tauntaun sleeping bag for when I want it, and that can only be good for me.
Because we were camping, there was a lot of stuff to cart around - sleeping bags and camp stoves and coolers and so on. My dad started staying - pick up your stuff, move that stuff, bring your stuff here. Us kids began to notice and then mock his over-usage of the word "stuff." I even bought a dog hand puppet to amuse myself in the way back, and named him Stuff. At that point, my father said, "That's it! No more stuff." After that, it was "Please bring these items to your mother" or "Where is the cooking paraphernalia?" but never did he say "stuff" again. At least, that is how I remember it.
I think back on this incident for a few reasons. One, it's summer time, and in a way, that was my most memorable summer. Kids love summer - when I was a kid, it was because I didn't have to go to school, which I was good at but did not actually like. When I was an adult, I looked back on all of childhood as if it was one long summer, because school now seemed like summer, i.e. meaning times I did not have to work. I'd rather go to school that work, but there you are - I did not know that when I was a kid, and therefore did not properly appreciate the summers off that I had. However, this year, I've had these 12 weeks off, from Memorial Day until mid-August, a summer if there ever was, and it's been glorious. More about that later.
The second reason I think of the stuff incident is because that is what a great deal of my summer has been taken up with: dealing with stuff. Stuff of ALL sorts - for the most part, I mean what my dad meant: all that crap that needs to be moved, put away, taken out, etc. In my case, since I'm now an adult with a house instead of a kid in a pop-up camper, it's not stoves and sleeping bags I move around but books, clothes, electronics and the like. (Actually, today I happened to be tacking the hall closet and I did in fact move my sleeping bag but that's not usual).
I have too much stuff. It's not a unique problem in America - or San Francisco, where the average living space is just smaller. Mostly, I have media: books (a small library at this point, which I love), CDs and DVDs, magazines (oh, the stack of unread New Yorkers!) and such. Also, clothes, including costumes; the Dickens Faire outfits alone means hoop skirts and petticoats, not really low-profile items when it comes to space - and then also fabric to make more costumes. Related to that is yarn and other textiles which brings me to art supplies, also abundant. Then there's the personal journals - shelves of them, and what's to be done about that? There's no throwing those out, but digitizing them is a titanic project and I have a hard enough time trying to find time to fill more of them.
Plus, all the other flotsam and jetsam of life: candles, sunglasses, vacuum cleaners, board games, pillowcases and all of that; it exists and must go somewhere. Don't get me started on whole other categories, like ephemera (paper stuff: bills, maps, plans, brochures, tickets, programs, receipts - that stuff that makes you feel like you are in the Matrix), and digital "stuff" (just because it's not taking up physical space doesn't mean it's not taking up head space and personal energy), and spiritual aids, like Tibetan Singing Bowls and divination decks and so on, of which I have probably too many but don't want to give any of them up.
And therein lies the problem: I don't want to give any of it up. Why? Because I either use it enough currently to justify its presence in my house OR (and this is a big "or") I hope to become the kind of person soon who WILL use that item enough in the future to justify its presence. Clutter is just hope in disguise. In other words, if I toss those art supplies, my brain says and my heart feels that there goes the hope that I will EVER get into making visual art. Which I very much want to do. Unfortunately, I very much want to do many things.
More, in fact, than I am beginning to suspect I ever can. I think often of a quote from organizational guru David Allen (the Getting Things Done guy), who said: "You can do anything, but not everything." I heard that one about a decade ago and it's still sinking in. I know that life is, many ways, about choices, and priorities. And like it or not, what we own - just like what we do - tells a story about our choices and priorities. Those choices I've made and priorities I apparently operate under have been thrown into high relief as I've spent days and days working on my (and house) stuff: I've cleaned closets and drawers and the dark spaces under the built-in liquor cabinet. I even had to work on garden stuff, weeding this and planting that, for almost a week. I've hauled, sorted, tossed out, donated, dropped off, repaired, re-gifted, mailed, consumed or otherwise somehow disposed of a great deal of STUFF this summer. It's amazing how much could go.
Even more amazing: how much there is still left to do. This is tough to face on three levels, one being the sheer amount of time. I feel like, enough already! I can't spend any more life organizing stuff. The second is making the constant decisions. What the hell is more emotionally tiring than making decision after decision? Every shirt, towel, book has to be evaluated. Do I keep it, will I use it, when I did I use it last? It's exhausting. And then the third, deepest level, is dealing with what it all means. Each item isn't just itself, but has layers of meaning. Well, most of them do - tossing out the expired sunscreen is no problem, but I can experience whole periods of intense personal examination and questioning when confronted with, say, thinning out my jewelry, because of what it brings up.
Here's an example: I was able to bring myself to toss out (and in SF, that means "leave by curb until someone claims it as theirs") an zafu and zabutan. These are cushions typically used in sitting zazen, classic Zen meditation - but not used by me! I finally had to admit that I was not going to ever get to using them. I just wasn't. It's been X of years I've been meaning to get to it, and at some point, I have to accept it not happening, and move on. It's not always easy. Craft stuff was relatively painless - if I ever actually get to the point of making a red glass seed bead necklace, I will just go re-buy supplies then, but for now, someone at SCRAP can make good use of them. Thinking of the cost, by the way, of all of these items, is its own depressing meditation which I won't go into but you can plainly see where that line of thinking goes.
Other stuff, not so easy. I've got oodles of writing and mostly it's fragments but I'm a writer so no throwing those out (I'm digitizing those bit by bit). Then I'm a sucker for sentimental value and memorabilia, so that's a whole menu of pitfalls and difficult decisions. My mother passed away this summer - which I also hope to write about at length separately but it does play into my feelings about dealing with stuff. She was a crafts person and an artist, so I have all these handmade things from her - from pop up cards to knitted scarves - that I'm not sure what to do with. She made me things often that were not to my taste, and I will never use, and these used to be somewhat hard to get rid of but now, after her death, I come across one and I can't let it go. Because her death means, I now know that I have all of the stuff my mom will EVER make for me, all the birthday cards she will ever send. My mom's physical expression of her love for me is now a known, finite resource. I decided to just save it all to look at later; it's only been just two months so it's to early to deal with it.
Harder still was dealing with HER stuff, which I also had to do. Deciding what to keep was not hard - you keep the handmade quilts, obviously, and the poetry and pictures and grandpa's Bronze Star. But then, what to DO with these things? I have no kids and it's likely my one nephew won't reproduce and/or want any of this, so there's no easy answer of just keeping it for my kids (who presumably would keep it for their kids and their kids) so I have to think about it and I find myself getting into this weird state of just wondering what it's all about, anyway. Even if I did have kids, what good are heirlooms anyway, other to say, look, there's that heirloom of ours - and burden the kids with more stuff, from generations past that they can't get rid of. I mean, I can use my mom's quilts but there's no practical use for her high school yearbook. I start to get very existential about it and end up feeling doubtful about it all and ready to give up the notion of personal property altogether.
Unexpectedly, my mother's death and her leftover stuff was also instructive and, frankly, scary in a way I did not predict, which is it made me extremely aware of my own mortality. My mother was an incredible pack rat as well as a very creative person and she left behind many unfinished projects - fabric never sewn, yarn never knitted. She had a half-finished quilt, which I'm sure she did not start with any idea that she might not live to see it finished, but that is just what happened. Aside from the inevitable sadness sort of inherent in this subject, there's also the specific sadness of my mom and how she related to me and now, how I relate to stuff. I go through my house, my closet, my things, and I can't help but think: is this how I want to spend my time? By that I mean, not just that I don't want to spend more time on organization, but also, what about the time spent on using it all? Do I want to spend my time, ever, doing embroidery? I thought I did, but now I see I don't, so out all of that goes.
We all know the phrase life is short, but it's also always getting shorter. I used to have quite a few 20-year time periods left and now I don't. If I want to ever spend more than about 30 years doing something (like, say, playing the piano), and I don't already do it, I need to start RIGHT NOW. So it's not just that I am having to deal with admitting to parts of my personality that I wish were different (I am not someone who sits zazen, I'm facing it) but also realizing I have to make more choices about how I spend my time. If it takes me three hours to sew curtains, that's three hours out of the sum total of my life hours, and would I rather be doing something else with them? I mean, I realize that is not a very zen / flow / Alan Watts way of looking at time and things, but I can't help but think in those terms.
This consideration of time and how it's spent has been, I would say, the main project of my sabbatical, for which I had MANY goals, as I've written about. In the end, I maybe got to 8% of them - I either did it or started it. But the overarching one has been just understanding these concepts in a new way. My big goal was to discover what it was like to live as a human being in the world instead of some productive entity rushing somewhere and accomplishing something on an endless to do list, and in that sense, I feel I was successful. I did not spend ALL my time working on my stuff. There was the travel, and the social time and so on. But I also zoned out. A lot. I stared into space, in my garden. I lingered. I wandered. I browsed. I lazed. I took my time. If I sat down for breakfast and didn't feel like getting up when I was done but reading for 20 more minutes, that's what I did. And it has been WONDERFUL. I do indeed feel human again. Doing nothing is totally all its cracked up to be. There's time to think, and time to not think too.
But I didn't get to much else. So, the exercise routine, the novel about India, the ukulele recording sessions, the drawing and watercolor sessions, the sewing days, the learning how to cook days - that all did not happen. I have two weeks left so I know it's not gonna happen, either. Instead, I'm going to work on DECIDING what I want to do so that when I get back to working life (not "real life" because this is also real life), I will know what to do. I will have all those scattered desires gathered together a bit more, and sorted in my heart so I can better follow my bliss, as Joseph Campbell so wisely advises.
Because I do want that rich, full life. Yes, there's going to be pillowcases needing to be washed and folded and yes, there's going to be bills to pay, and yes, there's some amount of time you spend doing THAT stuff. But you need some of it. The last ten days have been focused on our living room remodel (remove stuff, paint room, pull up carpet, sand and finish the hardwood floors revealed, wait for stain to dry, put room back together); it was a real pain in the ass and I never want to do it again, but it's way better. My entire life will improve. So that's the whole thing - to make the amount of time one spends dealing with "stuff" (and you can read that as emotional, energetic baggage too) worth it.
As for what I did accomplish, I can only hope that it helps. That having all my ukulele music sorted will make it easier for me to play my uke. That having my pens, pencils and paints ready means I can take up art in the evenings after work because I won't need to spend 30 minutes tracking down what I want. Creating a space for me to sit and read that's comfortable and well-lighted will presumably increase my reading time. That's the idea, anyway. Who knows what I will actually do? This time off has been experimental, all about discovering WHAT I do when I have that much time; when the time off is over is what I will have the time to implement what I learned about who I am and what I want.
Anyway, I can now easily find my Tauntaun sleeping bag for when I want it, and that can only be good for me.
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