Are You Too Attached to Your Stuff?

I know the kids are in here somewhere... I just lost them temporarily, in the middle of all my clutter.

We moved into our current house to be closer to my job. At the time, it was a major upgrade for us. We gained quite a bit of square footage, replete with built-in book shelves, numerous storage closets and a finished basement.

Woohoo.

Five years later and without too much dedicated effort, we had successfully filled up every closet, shelf, nook and cranny.

With what, you might ask?

Let’s see. My grandmother’s china, three additional sets of “everyday” dishes, four times as many pots and pans as there are burners on my stove and enough glassware to serve lemonade to the entire neighborhood.

My bedroom closet was jammed full of clothes for every season, in sizes ranging from six to twelve. The closet in the guest bedroom was overflowing with boxes of boys’ clothes, handed down from my sisters’ children, waiting for someone to fit into them. My sons’ dresser drawers could barely close, due to the dozens of tee shirts they had each collected.

Bookshelves in four different rooms were exploding with thousands of books on a hundred different
subjects. Many of them I’d read and many of them I had not; some I would doubtless read again someday and some I had not bothered to finish the first time around.

The back wall of my garage was stacked with boxes that had not been unpacked since we moved. A storage closet in the basement was similarly loaded. There was a locked trunk down there that I was pretty sure hadn’t been opened since I graduated from college.

In a back corner of the basement were a baby’s crib, double stroller, playpen, two twin mattresses and four huge oriental rugs.

Need I go on??

I know this is not good. I've read my share of books on feng shui ; who wouldn't want to transform their lives with a strategically placed crystal or houseplant? The problem with feng shui has been that it always seems to start with de-cluttering.

"A cluttered house yields a cluttered mind." Or, something like that.

My mother used to call me a “packrat”, and probably still does behind my back. The thing is, she’s one too. I think it might be genetic.

As my mother has “matured,” she has put more effort into cleaning out her own clutter. She is particularly effective at tricking my sisters and me into taking said clutter off her hands.

She will innocently spread the detritus of our collective childhood out on her basement floor – usually at a good, sentimental time of year, like Thanksgiving – and tell us to “take whatever you want. The rest is going to the Salvation Army.”

This is why I have any entire “Christmas Village” of miniature houses, stores and churches boxed up in my basement right now.

I am susceptible to this stuff.

I am also rather compulsively frugal. It is very hard for me to get rid of something that I might actually use again some day... especially if there is no way to sell it for something that feels close to it’s perceived value.

This, I blame on my paternal grandmother. Pauline was a woman of the Depression . A real “waste not, want not” kind of gal. She refused to replace the old, broken down stove in her house because it still had one working burner (out of four).

You should see me squeezing the last dram of toothpaste out of the tube.

About eighteen months ago, despite a lifetime of trepidation about letting go of anything, I decided it was time for some serious de-cluttering in my life. I was determined to start clearing out my digestive system, my psyche and my closets.

It has been hard work on all fronts, but I am beginning to see signs of progress.

With help from an objective third party – i.e. not a relative and therefore in no way attached to any of my stuff – I attacked my garage and basement. We sorted out about half a ton of clutter to be eliminated from my house.

This “sorted” clutter remained more neatly stacked in my garage for another year.

Six months ago, I had my first ever garage sale.

I was still a bit nervous, so I said a prayer of thanks for these wonderful objects that had been a part of my life. I blessed them, and set an intention that they would all, somehow, end up in the hands of people who would truly need them and love them.

What a liberating experience! It felt so good to have seemingly worthwhile people lovingly carry my treasures down the driveway, that I started giving things away.

Talk about pennies on the dollar.

The few items left at the end (including my working twenty-five inch, cable-ready, wood console television from 1983,) were reverently displayed down by the road. Within forty-eight hours, they had all found new homes.

Ahhh.

Six months later, my house feels full again. I know that it isn’t, really. The flailing economy has helped cure me of my innate tendency to continuously acquire new stuff.

Still, I feel like I need to continue on this de-cluttering journey. There are places to go and things to do; adventures to be had. I no longer feel the need to drag all this weight around with me.

Here’s the thing: Over the past couple years, as I have worked to release the emotional baggage that I’ve carried inside me, I am more and more ready to jettison my material baggage as well.

I wouldn’t say that my attachment to things has totally disappeared. I am still hanging on to my grandmother’s china, at least for now.

But I think I’m ready to break into that locked trunk in the basement and discover its secrets.

Or maybe I’ll just pull it down to the end of the driveway and let it go.

Recommended Reading:

Do you need help getting started on your own journey of discovery?
Here are two great options: Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui , by Karen Kingston;

and Making Peace with the Things in Your Life: Why Your Papers, Books, Clothes, and Other Possessions Keep Overwhelming You and What to Do About It , by Cindy Glovinsky.