What the movers left behind could probably fill a one bedroom apartment, nothing larger. For me, it feels rather liberating to have sent so much clutter from my life. It’s not that I didn’t love the clutter – I certainly did – and I most surely enjoyed the process of acquiring it.
Earl and I are rather compulsive about neatness, keeping things in pristine condition while still using them, and often wanting to add a souvenir from a trip here or a memento from a trip there to our home. It was inevitable that we’d have a lot of stuff and that we’d spend a lot of time caring for it. So I’m dubbing these past ten years as “The Decade of Stuff.”
Today I’ve roamed our house – literally – and not missed the things we’ve sent off to the auction. I loved them in the moment, but now we’re looking at new moments and I’m eager to move on.
When we first moved into this house, my great friend Carol told me there were five stages to life, according to some Eastern philosophies. I can’t remember the first four, but the final one is called ‘Mendicant.’ It’s the one where you divest yourself of extraneous things and focus on what’s really important. Granted, part of the reason for the auction is that we’re moving to a place that’s half the size of our current home; and I don’t want it to have that warehouse look.
At the same time, maybe the mendicant in us is also at work. At this point, what’s really important is to make life simpler so that we can concentrate of spending time together, freer of household responsibility. Freer of funding a home that has clearly become too big for us and requires a “staff” to maintain in the way we like. Freer of stuff.
I think I’ll book a cruise to celebrate.
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