Prepping for Adventure
AKA - Why is it so hard to let go of our "stuff"?
We’ve got plans to try a slightly different version of life, sometime soon. One where we are not tied down to one place, working hard so that we can save enough money to see the world - which we do quite a bit anyway. But rather, our aim is to see the world whilst working, perhaps not quite as hard.
Digital nomading, the call it. This is exciting, but also confronting, as change always is.
As part of this change in scenery, we want to rent out our house. A house sitting empty for months at a time seems a waste of economic producing potential. Our children, off at university, are perhaps a little put out that their rooms are being requisitioned. I have mixed feelings about this too, quite a lot of which is based on my attachment to things.
Making one’s house “other friendly”, is no easy task. Our house is cluttered with stuff, accumulated with the passing of time and experience, that needs rethinking. Beyond the day to day bits and pieces of living, it is full of objects that we want, and also things that we might not. This is an opportunity to reset. But how to sort through it all and decide what to keep, or store?
How is it that we have amassed so much stuff, and why is it so hard to let go of it?
I’m not talking about sofas and chairs and beds – the furniture that makes living ever so much more comfortable. It’s all the other bits and pieces. Paperwork, table clothes, board games, photo frames, a hundred serving platters, all of which I seem unreasonably attached to.
The son of a friend has returned home from 5 years at university. He arrives packed into his little car like a sardine. There isn’t a space that hasn’t been filled with his belongings. Even socks have been separated to squeeze into tiny gaps between the cello and the computer. It clearly doesn’t take long to accumulate things. But the point is, he can still fit it all in one three-hour drive. The contents of my wardrobe alone would take two trips.
It's not even like I’m into clothes in any meaningful way. Still, somehow I have way more than I use, yet never quite the right things. I can’t seem to work this puzzle out. I solve it by buying more clothes I don't know what to do with.
Once upon a time we went back-packing for three months. Two pairs of pants, two pairs of shorts, a bikini, a jacket and three t-shirts seemed just fine. How much can you fit into a campervan I wonder? How much do we really need to live?
Humans are acquisitional by nature. I shouldn't despair. It’s a result of our evolution-programmed need for both status and belonging, themselves a consequence of us being social animals that exist in hierarchical tribal structures.
I wonder if, subconsciously, we collect things to give ourselves a sense of place. And with it, a sense of safety.
Our house overflows with things from Africa. Paintings and carvings, table clothes and trinkets both large and small. A large picture of an elephant that I adore, a great big giraffe to which foundational memories are attached. And still, most recently I returned with more.
None of this stuff can come with us on our escape into what might be thought of as freedom. But it does make me wonder what we mean when we say we want to be free. I’ve no real desire to give up the comforts, rituals and routines of my life, which are wound around important friendships – in the long term. I think we mean freedom from obligation. Yet even obligations give us a place in the world. Meaning.
I want the adventure, but I also want a place full of my stuff to return home to – maybe without the unnecessary clutter. At least that's what current me thinks. Adventure does have a way of changing you though.
Marie Kondo extolled us to throw things away that don’t spark joy. But it is far more complicated than that. What am I supposed to do with the reems of memories inherited from a dead parent? I can’t even throw away paperwork that is now 15 years out of date. The problem is I don’t know what might be useful at some point in the future, and what is not.
On our TV room windowsill we have a collection of glass spheres – you know, the type that have something captured or created within them. Clever and very pretty. There is a dandelion, and a flower made of bubbles in the glass, a flame of orange and one that evokes thoughts of the sea… and one with an amber heart and a silver swirl that looks like a galaxy - made from the ashes of Mike’s mum. An allegory of star-dust to star-dust, if there ever was one.
They harness light and throw it in dancing patterns about the walls. These are not mine, nor would they be something I would buy myself. Even under my watch, they are more often than not covered in dust.
Mike’s mum found them delightful, and collected them in droves. And she lives on, a little, with us because they are part of the stuff we have around us that is infused with her sense of wonder.
There is no world I can imagine where I would part with them. But I don’t know what to do with them either. Putting them in a box "just in case" seems ridiculous. At a cursory glance they are yet “more clutter”. But they hold memories. They echo with the voices of our dead, which itself connects us to the world – gives us a place in time, the before of which we are the after.
The stuff we “stuff” into our lives is not really about functionality, is it? It’s about identity and connection, about memory holding and grounding – and feeling at home, safe and secure in a universe that is incomprehensibly vast in both time and space. Sifting out the bits that you don’t want from the bits you do is harder than you might think. At least for me.
Discarding things that we might no longer want, and boxing up the things we might for our return feels like freedom in the same way as running off a cliff to go parapenting in Chile felt. Both exciting and daunting at the same time.
And yes, that’s a real experience scored deep into my memory, no trinkets required. At no point, when I was suggesting to Mike that I liked the idea of gently bobbing about in the thermals had I imagined the steps required to get there in the first place. I am deeply afraid of heights. But I did it anyway. I ran off that mountainside and hoisted myself onto the seat and it was terrifying but also glorious. Memorable, that's for sure. I don't have a single photo of the occasion. But I feel like a remember every moment of it all the same.
Maybe that is the point. You have to give a little to live a little. Letting go creates opportunities for more. Sometimes, you just have to run off the cliff if you want to soar with the birds.
Onwards to adventure
Sharlene