Things and Stuff

We grow attached to our things, over time.  Stuff grows on you.  Stuff piles up, especially in corners, or basements.  A garage, if left empty of parked vehicles, becomes a vacuum that sucks in stuff from all over, sometimes even other people’s stuff, which can be especially dangerous.

You can stuff a turkey, and the stuff with which you stuff it is called “stuffing”, and then, by the time the feast is over you put both hands on your belly and announce, “I’m stuffed!”  That does not make you a turkey, however.  What you said does.

So some stuff is good even if you’re not going to keep it very long, unless you forget it in the back of the fridge and it turns into weird stuff, or gloopy stuff or gross stuff, and it becomes bad stuff.  That kind of stuff is easy to be rid of.  Other stuff is more deeply attached, and harder to shake.

What kind of things do we tend to keep?  It’s different for each one of us.  Mostly, it seems like all those things have one thing in common, that they all have a story attached that explains why we still have that thing.  When the story attached to a thing falls away from that thing, as often happens when people die, the value disappears along with it, in many cases where the intrinsic value of the thing by virtue of it’s essence (think gold and silver) is not a shared thing.  In other words, if someone does not have a thing for that thing, it is nothing.  Does that even make sense?

But the main reason we love our stuff is because it’s our stuff.  We get to decide where to put it, how to protect it, and when and how to let it go.  We can write our names on it, or we can give it away.  We found it, bought it, stole it, begged it or otherwise obtained it because we decided we needed it, or it was a good deal and we never turn down a good deal, ideally.  And this is not to deny that some stuff shows up and you never quite figure out why or from where, like old broken kids toys or Styrofoam coolers split down the middle that all it needs is a dump run but who has the time right now to get around to it.  That kind of stuff is a drag.

And we like to do stuff with our stuff from time to time.  This is known as “doing my thing”.  That usually requires tools and expertise, if not just a large plate, so we tend to get more of those things that we need to do stuff with our stuff.  That is where the danger comes in, when we accumulate more stuff than we can store at any given time in our available space.  Or we bring in more things to which we plan to do stuff, but we can only do one thing at a time, so we wind up with too many things to do, mostly involving stuff.

I recall the story of the guy who owned too many vehicles, and he lived in a North Seattle neighborhood where parking was hard on the best of days, and when you saw the chalk mark on your tire it meant you had 24 hours to move that vehicle to a different spot.  So this guy was in so deep that once a week he would have to go out through the whole greater neighborhood and find all the cars, trucks and vans that he owned and, one by one, move them to a new spot somewhere else.  Quality of life tends to regress when we let our stuff get the better of us to the point of obsession.  It’s a bad thing.

I have philosophized in an earlier story that everything we possess has a hook embedded in our shoulders with an invisible line attaching us to that thing, and the more important that thing is to us, the stronger is that line and the deeper is that hook.  When things are ripped away from us against our will the hooks cause pain as they are yanked out, but the loss still has the effect of lightening our load a tiny bit.  But when we voluntarily exchange one of our things for money, or pass it on to an heir or give it to a good cause, we not only lighten our load, we lighten our mood as well, due to the relative heft of our wallet, or just the good feeling that comes with removing one more hook from our shoulders.

It is slowly coming clear to me as I get closer to that mythical checkout time that much of my stuff of which I am so fond may not be seen in the same light by whoever is stuck with getting rid of all that stuff if I’m not there to make sure it goes to the right person at the right price.  That’s why I have embarked on a project to lighten my load by finding a new home for some of this stuff.

Twenty-five or thirty years ago, when we lived in the same neighborhood as today, but a few blocks down the hill, we used to walk our dogs down the end of the block where the orchard used to be before the houses came in.  The old split cedar posts had rotted off at the base, and the last fifty feet or so of the woven wire fencing was coiled and tangled enough to be a problem, so I cut it off and coiled it up and brought it home, where it followed us here, because you never know when a nice chunk of spring steel fencing wire will come in handy, and there was a place on the garage wall where it hung all these years.  Well, just the other day I pulled down one of the remaining coils of this wire and gave it to a friend to reinforce a section of fence, which felt real good when I realized I had stored that wire for thirty years only to put it back to work doing what it was supposed to do, hold up a fence!  Now that is a good thing.

If I can only come up with something to do with all the rest of this stuff, that would be an even better thing.  :-{)}