The Incredible Uprising of Stuff

Two weeks ago I wrote about simplifying your life through the practice of Simplicity Parenting. I covered paring down your kids’ stuff, activities, even information. Apparently the universe thought I needed further lessons in the art of living simply, because since then my life has been one big look at everything that weighs me down.

The first event was a metaphor for the whole thing. Due to roots in the pipes, our toilet backed up and all that one wants to eliminate and forget began to rise up and threatened to eclipse us.

Moments after the plumber called a crew to help us clean up the mess, there were several large men in our cottage, furniture being moved against closet doors and carpet being ripped up. “You’re probably gonna have to move out for a while,” Frankie said as my 1-year-old toddled toward the disaster. Or was it Bobby that said that? The whole lot of them had personas like friendly Teamsters.

“Um, ok well, can one of you watch my kids while I try to pry open those closet doors and pack some of our stuff?”

Our family had just gotten home from a trip and as I ripped clothes and baby blankets out of one bag to stuff them into others, piles of unfolded laundry from before the trip merged with what had came back dirty. The slow process of laundry mating had begun.

By the time we returned to grab more supplies a day later, it seemed the piles had reproduced and grown threefold. It wasn’t hard to see that, once again, our clothing had started to take over our lives.

As it is for many families I know, laundry is a staunch battleground on the front lines of domesticity for us. With four people in the household, at least two of them epically messy, we are never caught up on the laundry. What’s worse, our space is so small that once laundry is out of the dryer, it must get folded and immediately put away if we want anywhere to sit or sleep. I endlessly envy people with laundry rooms and when I hear a friend nag her husband to, “Just leave it in the laundry room, please. I’ll come get it if I need to!” all I can think is what a luxury that must be.

Frankie, or was it Wenciss, also told us he’d get the insurance to pay for a pack-out company to box up our bedrooms while they were being re-carpeted. With no garage or built-in storage, I tried not to twitch at the idea of strangers relocating all of what’s stored under those beds, let alone the Ikea closets they’d have to empty and disassemble to get them out of the house.

When I showed up a day later to find stripped rooms and a locked storage pod on the street, I took deep breaths. It’s just stuff, right? Probably time to get rid of some it anyhow.

Well, that’s the gem of it all. Working with the pack-out company on the way back in, we were confronted with box after box of “keep, give away, throw out,” decisions. The opportunities seemed never-ending. Meanwhile the pack-out people tried, for two days, to reconstruct Swedish “furniture” that was never meant to be put together twice.

How many of you store stuff under your beds? Do you know what’s in every closet? Does your stomach lurch when you visualize it all stuffed into cardboard boxes?

It’s just stuff, lots and lots of stuff that we all retain in the innards of our lives. The reign of terror that it could rise-up and overtake us at any given juncture keeps us even more under its thumb. We want it, want more of it, need to organize it, are scared to face it, and never, ever, want to move it around. How much freer would we be if we could truly live simply and just let go of all the stuff?

I thought we were doing pretty well: rarely shopping, occasionally purging, not acquiring what we simply could not house. That was until the flood that rose up from the bowels of our home and just kept coming.

I wish I could say that our lives are light now that it’s over. Lighter, yes, but light—simple—they’re not. It’s a goal that may take a lifetime until, I can’t help but say it, the ultimate lightening of all the stuff. Because in the end, you really can’t take it with you. Not a bit of it is that important.