Unpacking my life (so far)
I've decided to become nimbler by giving up what I don't need
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
(Lennon)
Unlike the late multimillionaire John Lennon, I’m not contemplating giving up absolutely everything I own. For one thing, I’ll be hanging on to the money I have, along with a few key investments. But when it comes to actual stuff, I’m downsizing by a quite dramatic degree.
I’ve decided to give away or sell many of the possessions I’ve accrued over six decades on this planet. And that isn’t easy, because so many of those things are attached to important memories.
I’ve taken all my things out of storage and I’m weighing up each item: should I keep it, give it away to family or a charity, try to sell it, or just throw it away?
I have thousands of things and, I suppose, a lot of them have been kept for a reason — although, in some cases, it’s because I’ve been too lazy to throw them out.
But storage is expensive, and my circumstances have changed (more on that in another missive).
I’ve been following some friends on Facebook as they pack up their lives and move to another house. A picture showed them with hundreds of books, which they are diligently boxing up to be reshelved in their new home.
Most of my books are being deposited in charity bins. Perhaps you’ll see my name and previous address scrawled inside your next purchase at the Lifeline Book Fair or in an op shop.
It’s hard to do, but I believe it to be necessary for me to move on. I’ve been helped by is the memory of a university tutorial when I was 18, where a mature-age student (who, at the time, seemed ancient but was probably in her late 30s or early 40s) told how her family home had burned down.
“I lost everything,” she said. “I don’t even have a photography of myself as a child.”
As I think of that, I remind myself that it’s not the objects themselves that are important. Should I need them, I can find the words from those books in a library or online.
The physical books, and the hundreds of other things I’ve hoarded over the years, are just props. It’s the memories they help rekindle that should be cherished.