I happened to close a bedroom door that I normally leave opened and noticed two long pieces of wood from a headboard that got damaged when I was packing things to move from Florida to Las Vegas back in 2016. Somehow these pieces made the journey across country even though they weren’t really usable for their original purpose. But I kept them, “just in case.” And they managed to make the move from my first Las Vegas apartment to my current lodgings. Honestly, it’s unlikely that I’ll find the needed hardware to remake the headboard given that my furniture crafting days are decades in the past. So why do I still have these two pieces of wood?
Given my history of frequently changing lodgings over the decades and two cross-country moves you’d think that I would have shed any superfluous belongings, especially non-functional or antiquated items, but that’s clearly not the case. It’s surprising how much stuff and furniture one can stuff into a small one-room studio apartment, but 13-years living in Long Beach meant that I had enough boxes of stuff to fill two moving pods. And then when I landed in Florida and moved into a spacious one-bedroom apartment, I increased my bookshelf space courtesy of IKEA. This only got worse when I bought my two-bedroom townhouse and went a little IKEA furniture crazy. I had a huge living room and two bedrooms to furnish, pretty much tripling my living space from what I had in Long Beach. Wooden-crate furniture was not going to cut it.
Little did I know that the economy would go in the toilet and losing my teaching job would mean I was going to lose my big townhouse, and that I’d have to stuff everything that I didn’t off-load into a small storage unit for a year and then a single moving pod for the journey from Orlando to Las Vegas. In the run-up to selling the townhouse I bought a multi-sheet scanner so that I could digitize all of my documents that had previously occupied two legal-sized four drawer filing cabinets. I spent weeks digitizing everything that I could and selling most of the IKEA furniture.1 Even with this reduction, I had over 40 office sized boxes plus furniture.
Now that I think about it, most of these boxes were probably for my physical media (DVDs, Blu-ray and audio CDs) and books. I attempted to digitize everything, but knowing how technology often fails, I’ve kept all of my physical media as backup for the digitized copies.2 There were many years, going all the way back to when I was a student at Fuller Seminary in the mid-1980s where I had a real problem constantly buying books that caught my eye. I have no idea how much I must have spent on Theology books during those years. I’ve moved to audio-books since the late 2000s, so that’s helped reduce the bookshelf clutter. Then before the move from Florida and most recently I’ve donated boxes of books to my local libraries and only kept the ones that have some emotional or personal significance to me. Even still, I could probably take a book or movie or TV series in my collection and not finish watching or listening to everything in my current collection between now and when my life draws to a close (and this is not counting streaming services!). There is a definite illogical force at work here, especially when I think about wanting to add to my collection (see my article about Wish Lists …). Yikes.
Maybe it’s not the illogical desire to expand one’s physical media collection or pieces from broken furniture, maybe you have a box or drawer full of cables from devices that you no longer have. Or, even better, you have a collection of remote controls to devices that either you don’t have or don’t work. I have a whole room (my second bedroom), the I use to store my stuff. What’s up with that? Why do we save all of this stuff?
One of my relatives joked that my parents, who grew up just after the Great Depression, had two of everything, and we’re talking about appliances, like refrigerators or oven/stoves, with one “in service” and one stored in a garage somewhere. I get that growing up with nothing, especially in households with lots of kids, makes one not get rid of anything. But I didn’t grow up in that world, I never went hungry or didn’t have my own bed to sleep in. True, we didn’t get everything we wanted (see Wish Lists ), but that’s just the way the world works… or so I thought. I guess, I still have that tendency of nearly never getting rid of anything. I thought that it must be because I’ve been so busy that I didn’t have time to “clean house,” as it were. I don’t seem to have that excuse any longer.
It seems so silly to have spent a lifetime gather this cumbersome pile of whatever… what does it mean? Is it going to mean anything to anyone else once I’m gone? Is my son or granddaughters going to care, or will it be a cause for them to think, “What the hell was he doing with all of his time?” Now I’m “worrying” about what others might think of the pile that I’m likely to leave behind? All because of pieces from a broken headboard? This is silly. Wait’ll they see what I have stored on my computer… nah, good luck with the passwords… (Note to self: need to complete and store my “Advance Directives” documents so that things aren’t an unnecessary pain once I’m gone). The point is that it would be a good thing to spend a little time reducing the clutter and living much more purposefully with whatever time I have. Stupid broken headboard!
Tags: advance directives, meditations on, saving stuff, too many boxes, what’s the point
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FOOTNOTES:- Funny that once I moved to Las Vegas, I’ve been buying replacing the furniture I sold in Orlando. I still had some PTSD over losing the townhouse and the move, so I took over half a year before I brought a replacement couch.[↩]
- Also, as someone who taught copyright at the university level, buying physical media only means that I have a license for that single media item. If I were to sell, give away or destroy said physical media than I would no longer have the rights to use the digitized copy that I have on my many hard drives. I could really reduce my storage footprint if I got rid of said physical media, but I’ve had enough storage failures over the years to not trust things stored digitally… plus the legal issue mentioned before.[↩]
