The Sweet Afterlife of Stuff

After decluttering the kitchen, and evading the charges of the Balsamic Vinegar Police for establishing a balsamic vinegar cartel and disrupting the world supply with the untold multitudes of bottles of balsamic vinegar I turned out to have been hoarding -- anyway, as I say, I was thinking about Stuff. Because it turned out that the kitchen was not the only room afflicted with too much Stuff.

I know people have various reasons for holding on to too much Stuff. It’s daunting to tackle the piles and mountains of Stuff. There’s a fear that once you get rid of it, you’ll find yourself in desperate need of it. (“I wish I had a big tangled ball of string consisting of lots of smaller pieces of inconvenient lengths! And now that I’ve gotten rid of mine, I’m going to have to go buy a ball and tangle my own string! That’ll teach me! I’m never getting rid of string again!”) There’s guilt for not having savored the Stuff as much as you meant to. (“I can’t get rid of that book on building your own birdhouse. Someday I’m going to have a couple of weeks free to build my own birdhouse and I’m going to enjoy it so much that I can't let that potential birdhouse joy vanish from my life.”) There’s the Stuff with sentimental attachments, especially if there's guilt in the mix. The music box from Great-Aunt Edna, whom you didn’t visit on her 90th birthday, and now she's gone, and you must treasure that music box forever, even though “Feelings” was never your favorite song...

For me, anyway, the biggest obstacle to getting rid of Stuff is the myth of the perfect home, the sweet afterlife of Stuff. This myth says that it is a grave sin to get rid of something unless it will find the absolute perfect home -- the heavenly Stuff afterlife. If it’s a book on seventeenth-century church architecture, signed by the author, you must find someone who loves seventeenth-century church architecture and bestow it on them. Because this book is precious! It can’t just go into the general maw of used Stuff! Hey, all my Stuff is precious, right? Or else I wouldn’t still have it. A household of one hundred thousand items of precious Stuff.

But as the FlyLady says, you can’t organize clutter.

Among my 100,000 items are:

several spools of reflective tape from the 1940s
Mickey Mouse one-reelers from the 1940s or something, abundant and worth about $3 according to eBay
a stroller in good condition
two child’s car seats, stained but recent and sturdy
an old pair of binoculars
several more old pairs of binoculars
a wind-up wall clock that strikes the hour
a working desktop photocopy machine from the '80s

Now I know what you’re going to say. You're going to say, “You could give that stroller to a women’s shelter ... I bet the Audubon Society would know someone who would like those binocs ... you could sell the clock on eBay ..." But, you know, that way madness lies. Because if you have to find the perfect, appropriate home for every single piece of excess Stuff in your house, you will spend the rest of your life dealing with your Stuff. It will take forever. It will take all your time. You can't do it. You have to get rid of it in big job lots, and turn your face resolutely away from the loss of potential birdhouse joy, and the spectre of Great-Aunt Edna, and the fact that there is probably a Museum of Reflective Tape with a gap right in the 1940s collection that you could have filled, but you were too selfish...

Also, there are people whose whole lives consist of trawling through Goodwill and the Salvation Army looking for things, and they'll see your Stuff, buy it, sell it on eBay for about 1/100 the trouble it would take you (because they know what they’re doing), and the Stuff will eventually find an appreciative home.

Except maybe for the reflective tape. I’m a little worried about the fate of the reflective tape.