Stuff

I've been thinking about my stuff lately. I've started to list more and more of it for sale, and more and more of it has gone as people come to claim our items. Of course, at first I felt sad about this. After all, we'd collected all these items for years and years, many items we'd used hundreds of times, and now it was slowly but surely disappearing. Undoubtably, this was something ending. But it's something beginning, too. I don't begrudge myself—it felt natural to be sad—but I did start to wonder why.

We've started to put aside the items we want to keep, the things that have more sentimental than material value, or the things we feel that Kondo-esque spark with, and hope to hang on to until we do find a spot we want to settle down in.

The more stuff I sorted, the more stuff I sold, the more I started to see it for what it was: stuff. It's just stuff. Some of it is nice stuff, good quality stuff you'd be happy to have. Some of the rest of it is just functional stuff, things we used for a purpose, but at the end of the day, almost all of it is just replaceable stuff.

I started to think a lot about the alternative: spending years and years simply accumulating stuff moving from one house to the next, bringing it all with us each time. You ever walk into someone's house, and they've got decorative items on shelves, and you can tell they were set once and have never been moved? Sure, we'd get rid of some things here and there, replace some things with nicer, more spark-inducing stuff, but you never really know how much stuff you've got until you throw it all into focus like I'm doing now.

At the end of the day, almost all of it is just replaceable stuff.

A big part of the push to do this is just to introduce a little more friction in our lives, as weird as that seems. I'm wary of familiarity, in the same way I'm wary of experience or memory. Those of you who know me might be surprised at this, because I am undoubtably a man of routine. I yearn for habit. Of course, it's comforting to be in a familiar situation. It feels nice to be a regular at a cafe, or do the same things in the same order each morning. But I think there's a danger in it, as well. Doing things simply because that's how you've done them, using the same things because that's simply what you have.

There are things I already know I will miss, and I think even more things I haven't even realized I'll miss yet. It's hard to know how it will feel, and I know there will be countless things that are difficult, frustrating, and painful. But it's such a rare opportunity, too. Things might not be as automatic as plopping down on my couch, clicking on my nice TV, but I'm excited to see what blooms in this space we're opening up. It's a chance to think about what we actually need, and what's simply a vestige of the way things have always been done.

We haven't decided what apartment we'll be moving into yet, but you can bet it'll be smaller than the one we've got now. Even worse, it's going to have nothing in it. A blank slate. Our needs are constantly changing, and our taste has developed more, too. I wonder what sort of place we'll make it into, what sort of stuff we'll decide to put in it.