Downsizing

In this day of hoarding awareness, my natural propensity to live sparsely has flourished. As I pack for my new home, I am tossing and giving things away enthusiastically.

Pots and pans, associated with so many evenings of conversation and good eating, have outlived their purpose in my current life. They are trash now. There are fewer flat walls in my new garret. Paintings and prints are being reviewed and deemed essential or redundant. Later this morning, men from a charity will be toting away two sofas I have had for the last 16 years. I never liked their color, chosen by a former artsy housemate. This is a truly joyful evacuation.

The sheer weight of it all reminds my vintage body that it's best to keep things simple in future. Yesterday, I took apart the guest bedroom. The new place has no guest room. So, I stood and calculated what has to go and stay from that pile of things. As I stripped the guest bed, I realized I could easily count the number of nights it had been used in the past five years. I had to laugh at my own ritual curatorship of a relatively unused room over those years.

Discarding things which once held significance in my life is a reminder of its transitory nature. Perhaps moving many times in my life has aided my practice as a humanist, focused on people instead of possessions. I have been guided for years through my life's changes by a saying given to me by an elderly patient many years ago. "Hey, kid," he said, after he overheard me telling a fellow worker about some minor trauma in my young life, "don't sweat the small stuff!"

The more I understand that life's daily quality is the "big stuff", the less anything else matters. The alchemy of turning treasures into trash, or another's treasure, is a skill which will serve me well as age brings its changes and inevitable economies of scale. Letting go and moving constitute the shared destiny of us all.