My recent missive about packing up my life and throwing away or selling many of my belongings certainly touched a nerve with some readers. And that feedback has helped cause a small change of heart on my part.
First, here are some of the comments from social media links to the post:
Jill: “I'm not so keen on this. I always need something that's gone. I'm the keeper of the family pics and my grandson is playing with 30 year old Lego.”
Lee: “Excellent idea.Those of us who have moved around a bit generally find it easier. I guess we shed as we go.”
Leo: “If an item anchors a special memory I would never let go... I have seen people rent a space at the local market and sell just about everything they own. At the end of the day they have a bit more money but not much of their former life...and that money tends to go quickly for some reason.”
Bob: “I should be doing the same thing, too much stuff.”
Sally: “I shed my past and future at the same time. It was harder than I’d expected, but necessary, and definitely liberating.”
Graeme: “Got my life down to 30kg when I first moved to Thailand, definitely liberating. Took ages to digitise all the music and photos.”
So, my original aim was to do a Graeme and get rid of just about everything I couldn’t fit into a suitcase.
Then I thought maybe I’d have one or two boxes of stuff. It wasn’t long into the process that I realised I’d probably want to hang on to, say six boxes full of “essentials”.
These include a few items that trigger cherished memories, plus a lot of writings (and some very bad drawings) by a much younger me that I’d forgotten about, but now view as indispensable.
(It also occurred to me that some of these writings might be of interest to others. So there, perhaps, is another blog, or vlog or podcast in the making.)
The original plan is still in place — I will be dramatically downsizing, but I’m not going to be quite as ruthless as I thought.
The big takeaway is that I’m glad I’m doing the sorting now, while I have the facility to weigh up each item and can think of ways to repurpose some of them!
The problem, though, is: where do I store what I don’t throw away? My closest relatives are not exactly keen on keeping my stuff for me, and storage is expensive.
So, once again, I throw it over to you, dear reader: what’s a good solution to the storage problem? Sharing somebody else’s space and paying a percentage of the costs, perhaps?
As long as the collection of Beat Up editions is safe ...