A Small Epiphany: Stuff as Burden, Stuff as "Just In Case"

At least I hope it is, in the sense of "revelation" rather than "manifestation," and I hope it sticks.

Last night I was putting stuff away (no, not in the studio--not yet) and thought of something I needed to buy. Something--I have no idea what, of course, having forgotten it almost immediately--organizational, I think. Some file or storage something, perhaps. And as soon as I thought of that--thought I should go make a note so I could pick one up the next time we're out--I thought, "Nah. I don't want something else to bring into this house." And I kind of stopped what I was doing and realized, very clearly, that I really *do not* want anything else in here, and that the reason why is because anything I buy and bring home is something for which I'm responsible and something I have to take care of. Now, I've thought of this before and have probably written about it before, but it really stuck me last night and again this morning, about how everything I have is something that's my responsibility. To pay for, sure, and to bring home, but also to take care of--find a place for (a biggie) and keep clean and in good repair. This feels overwhelming, this responsibility.

Things deserve to be used. Most things have some purpose, and many things can have multiple purposes. But no thing has as its purpose being stored somewhere and never being used for anything. Unless it's ballast, maybe, or is being used in some structural way--like you have a bunch of old tires that you've accumulated and then build some solar dwelling and use the tires as insulation. But I don't know that that would count as just being stored because now the tires have taken on a different role and are fulfilling that.

So never mind that part.

What this past week has brought home to me is that stuff is a burden. It may be lovely stuff, fabulous stuff, stuff that you like, but it still requires effort from you. Looking around this room right now, looking at all the stuff piled out here waiting to go back into the sewing studio, I'm struck by how much of it isn't being used for anything. It has a purpose--an extra-large cutting mat, for example. It's a good cutting mat, and it wasn't cheap. I've had it for years, and I've stored it, at various times, against the wall and under the daybed. But here's the deal: I've used it maybe once, long ago. I can't ever remember using it, although I'm sure I must have. But for years it hasn't served any purpose and has been shifted from one storage place to another. The problem is that I can imagine a time when I might use it: I've sometimes thought of creating my own bias tape for edging some garment I'm making. To do that, I would need a bias tape maker, which I have (somewhere) and a cutting mat and rotary cutter to cut the fabric. So I have an imagined use for the mat. But would I ever actually make my own bias tape? That seems a little anal to me--like the finished garment would be all nuclear and buttoned up and not at all funky. And the idea of measuring (which, as you know, I avoid like the plague: once an OCD brain gets into Measuring Mode, you can kiss the rest of the day goodbye) rows and rows of fabric to cut on the bias makes me shudder.

And, seriously, I can't think of any other occasion on which I might need a cutting mat. If I did, I have several smaller ones that would work. If I really needed one this big, I could probably afford to buy one. But maybe I wouldn't want to buy one, and if I didn't have one, I wouldn't make the bias tape and so would miss the opportunity to make something fabulous that would Change My Life. Isn't that what we all think about stuff, that it might someday Change Our Lives in some undefinable way?

I'm thinking of this as I look at each thing. The Singer Heavy Duty sewing machine my mother bought for me years ago. It has been used maybe three or four times. When she bought it, we thought it was for heavy-duty sewing, like for jeans and leather. What it was, however, was for lots of use, like in a home ec. class. So it's not exactly what we thought it was, and I've never really found a use for it. My Kenmore workhorse does what I need it to do. And if it can't do it, there's the Janome. But: if those two machines died and I needed a sewing machine, I would have it. Plus my mother bought it for me, and she's gone and I didn't keep a lot of her stuff and so feel an attachment--or at least an obligation--to the stuff that I *did* keep, like this machine and Sewing Machine #4, her own olive green Elna, which I have never used since I was in high school and wasn't really allowed to use much even then.

Do you see? Stuff. Thinking about it is taxing, and I don't want that. I don't want The Burden of Stuff. I don't want to have to think about it and store it, clean it and organize it.
I want not to have to think about Stuff. I want to have what I need and have that where I can get to it easily, with no thought. What I want is for the implementation of ideas to be a seamless flow.

I can categorize my stuff this way:
~~stuff to which I have no attachment, either emotional or utilitarian. Most of this I've gotten rid of already, but it seems that more and more of what is left has begun to drift into this category.
~~stuff that's so integral to my life that I don't even think about it and can't imagine getting rid of it. Embroidery floss, fabric, beads, buttons, needles, pins, thread. Stuff like that. Clothes I love and wear constantly, like my journal skirts. Technological stuff--the iPhone, the iMac, the Flip video camera--that I use regularly.
~~everything else.

 It's the Everything Else that I'm thinking about. It sounds like nothing, but to do it well (the thinking about it) requires great effort. You look at something--some Thing that you own--and consider its value to you vs. the amount of responsibility it requires to maintain it. Is it worth the effort? What *is* its value to you? What is its intrinsic value? And extrinsic? For me, a lot of what I think about is about storage. If I keep it, where will it live? How easy will it be to get to it? What will it displace? This is important: if I can't get to something easily, I won't use it/wear it/think about it. If something takes up space but isn't important enough to me to justify that space, space that could be used for something else, then is it really valuable at all?

I can see what the problems have been in the past. One is Stuff as Security: what if I need X and can't find any more like it? So I'd better have multiples: a black pair of my favorite brown boots, a dozen pair of socks, a back-up coffee-making device. Or Stuff as A Bargain: it's such a great deal that I'd better buy it now just in case--Just In Case--I need it later. Or something is so cool and funky that I have to buy it; this is a huge problem at estate sales, which are also really bad for Stuff as Orphans: I find things that belonged to someone else that are now homeless, and I feel sorry for them (I'm not talking dolls or anthropomorphically-inclined stuff; I mean even stuff like old empty wooden spools and a sock darner and rocks and stuff) and am compelled to take them home. Or, I think, *was* compelled. I've gotten a lot better about this part already. I go to fewer estate sales just so I won't feel sorry for the stuff being sold. Yes, I fully realize this is extremely pathetic.

Another reason for all of this, I suppose, is that my family didn't have a lot of stuff when I was growing up. My parents were frugal people, sure, but the main reason was that we moved constantly through the oil-producing western states, and everything we owned had to fit in a little green trailer about 1/6th the size of this office studio I'm sitting in right now. All our clothes, all my toys (quite a lot of those), all our dishes and household stuff--it all had to be packed and moved with just days' notice. My mother didn't buy stuff because she couldn't fit it into the trailer. All her keepsakes were stored at her parents' house, and it was only after we quit moving so often that she began to acquire things. Maybe that's part of why I have stuff. But what I have to keep in mind about that part is all the things my mother managed to acquire after that, all the things I had to allow someone else to get rid of after she died. Which is kind of where this whole thing really started for me: seeing how much stuff my mother had, stuff that she had never used.

Now here I have to explain that I am not a hoarder, not by any means. I'm not compelled to keep stuff. I don't have piles of papers--the only papers I have are a bin with the back taxes stuff and two file cabinets. One of them is for writing--a paper copy of all the published stuff. I'm not sure about this--sometimes I think I'll just toss all that, but then other times I go to file something I've finished and find it satisfying to see file drawers of two decades of my work all nicely filed in chronological order so that I could, if I were so inclined, go back and re-read the very first article I ever wrote for publication. I'm not so inclined, and I can't really imagine that someday someone would want all these folders (no one I know actually reads the stuff I write, not all of it--even my mother didn't read it all, and unless I shoot someone in some spectacularly scandalous fashion, I won't be famous and these won't be worth squat), so I can see a time when I'll just ditch all that. When I began this career in 1991, you still wanted a hard copy of everything you wrote, Just In Case. And, having once lost a nearly-finished article when an early computer ate it all and died, I do print out work as I go along, Just In Case. But after it appears in print, what's the point of keeping a copy? I have no idea. Vanity, I suppose: imagining that it's all meaningful. If I got rid of all of this--including the entire printed draft of each of the books--I could free up an entire filing cabinet. But then, I think, could I actually get rid of the cabinet itself, or would I keep it Just in Case?

Sigh.

I don't save stuff--no bags of string or balls of aluminum foil. I don't save ticket stubs or menus or any of that. I don't print out photos Just In Case. So no, no hoarding. No collecting--no rows of little ceramic cats (aieeeeeee!) or Bakelite jewelry or FiestaWare. No collecting. For me, it's about Stuff I Might Need, I think. And I'm thinking more and more about that and really trying to be clearer about that so that, instead of More Stuff, I can have More Space. Other people tell me they love to be surrounded by fabulous things that inspire them. I hear this a lot, and I understand how they like to look around them and see things that give them ideas. I'm not so much inspired by what's around me (although that's not always true; see below) as I am by what's in my head, and when I get an idea, I need free space so I can grab everything, lay it out, and start working. If I can't do that--if there's no room (like these past two weeks) or if I can't get to my tools (like when we're traveling) or if there's no time (when life is cluttered)--then the idea becomes exponentially less and less interesting over a relatively short period of time as other ideas take its place. If I don't pursue it right away and develop it and nourish it, it fades into nothing. I hate that--I've lost so many ideas that way. It's not about capturing them and writing them down; that doesn't help. It's doing something with them while I'm in love with them, before I fall in love with something else. For instance: I woke up in the middle of the night last week and saw this on the table by the bed:

I fell back asleep happily imagining an appliquéd and embroidered panel for the long journal skirt, kind of Peter Max-ish, with the image of my eyes from an altered photograph I took of myself years ago. I woke up the next morning thinking how cool this would be and what fun it would be to work on with the panel on stretcher bars, about the swirls and colors. But I couldn't get to any of my stuff, since it was all stacked in various rooms, and I have no idea where that image is--it's been used on an apron and a couple art quilts, and I know I have a paper copy *somewhere.*

For a couple days this was really interesting to me, and I couldn't wait to get back in the studio and start playing with the idea. Paints! Maybe foils! But as the week wore on and then the weekend and now this week, it's become less and less interesting. I have other ideas for other things I want to do, and this image doesn't make me grin any more. Maybe it will later, and I know it would have if I'd tackled it the next morning; but for now, it's nothing to me. And I hate that. It would have been fun, and I would have liked it. But now I'm thinking of a jacket I want to make out of a linen shirt I've had for a couple years, and maybe that's what I'll tackle when all this dust settles. Or maybe I'll wake up in the middle of the night tonight and have a completely brand new idea with which I instantly fall in love. I have a drawer of bits and pieces of stuff like this--stuff I started and loved but couldn't work on right away so that by the time I got to come back to it, it no longer grabbed me. Sometimes I try to work up enthusiasm for one of them, but I've moved on. They're like old lovers you once found irresistible but that now just seem ordinary and kind of pathetic in their boringness.

I'm quite thrilled to be at this place in my life because it feels really freeing to find new homes for stuff and have room to shift around the things I keep. It's wonderful to have an empty table, for example, somewhere where I can walk in and spread out a garment I want to alter without having to shift stuff and clear away clutter, just spread it out and grab the pins and scissors and start working while the idea is fresh. That is a wonderful thing; it's one of things I love best about my life, the freedom to be able to do that.

It's marvelous to me to have a closet that contains only clothes I love so that the closet isn't packed so tightly with stuff that I can't slide the hangers along the rack and see what I've got. It's wonderful to have shelves in the storage building that hold labeled bins of fabric so that I can walk in, pick a bin, find the fabric, and bring it in the house, all in less than five minutes.

It's everything that interferes with these things that I have to deal with. The remaining Stuff I Don't Love & Don't Really Need But That is Really Cool or That Might Be Useful.

That stuff. That's the stuff I don't want to put back in the sewing studio and don't want in the storage building or my closets or anywhere at all. It's determining what, exactly, that stuff *is* that's the problem. Once I figure out what category it fits into, then I can go about finding a new home for it.

Whew. Thanks for listening to me think out loud about this. It helps a lot in clarifying the core of what needs to be done. Just as I've finally gotten to the place where we use every room in our house almost every single day--meaning we spend time in each one doing something, rather than just passing through--I want to get to the place where every single thing I own has a purpose and is used regularly, whether that's every day or once every six months. But not ever, ever stored someplace Just In Case.