Less Stuff

That’s all your house is: a place to keep your stuff. If you didn’t have so much stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. You could just walk around all the time. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. – George Carlin

It doesn’t start off as stuff, of course. First, there is each individual thing. I love things to the point of almost animism. (As a child, I would get attached to the “perfect” stick, rock, feather, almond. I remember once being smitten with an almond; I literally thought that I would make a necklace for it and carry it around for the rest of my life. I don’t remember what happened to that almond—I probably gave up eventually, and ate it.) Each thing is imbued with personality. Memory.

But, ultimately, things amount to stuff. I don’t want it. I want to wage war on my stuff. I wish I could be the kind of person who could easily pack all of her belongings into one suitcase. I feel like my clutter slows me down, messes with my brainwaves, saps my energy. When I walk into a room that is organized and meditative and clean—I think, This is what I want, too. Like my battle with eating too many sweets, I have tried different tricks. For every new thing that enters the apartment, one old thing would have to leave it. Or, for a while, I was getting rid of one thing a day.

The sort of funny aspect of the whole situation is that I am personally quite messy. It’s possible that the dark feeling of stuff descending wouldn’t be so strong if I put things in their place. It’s drastic, really, to instead just wish the stuff gone.

Still, I want to be ruthless. I want to own less things. Less clothes, less books, less papers, less pots and pans, less cables and cords, less magazines, toiletries, spices.

Less, less, less.