I heard a piece on the radio the other day. It featured short clips from various people talking about the satisfaction of divesting themselves of stuff they had accumulated. One person spoke of the pleasure he got from giving away once-valued possessions, and seeing his pleasure reciprocated by the people who received his stuff. “Here, have this lawnmower. Would you like this fruit juicer? How about this set of tools?”
Although I believe the world divides between keepers and chuckers, relatively few people occupy the extreme ends of that divide. And I suspect many of those are obsessive personalities or otherwise mentally unbalanced. But there are many people for whom deliberate keeping or chucking behaviour is a rational choice, not a compulsion.
The keeping response is typically captured by the phrase, “this may come in handy someday” and of course requires enough room for all the one-day useful stuff that gets kept. In the best case, all that stuff is organized and cared for. I had an uncle like that, with a garage full of wooden crates, all labelled and neatly stacked and filled with useful things held in readiness.
On the other extreme is the hard-core ascetic, who shuns possessions of any kind other than the necessities of daily life. This is the realm of mountain-top hermits and appeals to those of us troubled by mindless consumerism. The people in the radio piece said they felt little regret as they rid themselves of unneeded personal possessions. They spoke about possessions as a distraction, as clutter that filled both their homes and their minds. Eliminating clutter gave them peace.
I live with a partner who is a chucker. I am inclined to be a keeper. This is part of our yin/yang complementarity. Virtually every non-necessary thing in our home – typically something artful – is something I have acquired. My partner doesn’t disapprove of these things – she rather likes the artwork and other stuff I have bought over the years. But she has very little interest in acquiring such stuff herself.
Recently I have started to question the value of having possessions. Or at least having as many non-functional possessions as we have – which, in fairness, is not that many. But to consider divesting, unless you go all the way, means putting a relative value on each possession and deciding where the line should fall on the scale of keeping vs. chucking.
Years ago I went through this exercise in a modest way. My partner said we should get rid of some books. She proposed that unless I intended to read a book again, I should get rid of it. This was a serious test for me. I took her meaning to heart, but I couldn’t use her rule. I had many books that I knew I would never read again (in all my life I’ve only read one book twice) but toward which I felt a strong attachment. I also like to lend favourite books to friends and to my children, who sometimes humour me by pretending to read them. I ended up getting rid of half my books. And I could probably eliminate half of what remains without trouble. I know the books I want to keep – the ones that have influenced me; the rest are expendable.
The photo for this post is of something I value, but which has no value to virtually anyone else. It shows my grandmother and her sister, circa 1915, before she was married. I never met my grandmother. She died in 1924 in Nanaimo of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix. In her face I see my father, who died in 1981. The rarity of this photo – there is only one other of my grandmother – is what makes it precious to me.