A few months ago I moved to a new city a couple of states away. When I moved, I put almost all of my worldly possessions into a big storage unit. To the new city, I took only what would fit in the back seat and trunk of my compact sedan and I shipped a few moving boxes ahead. Other than that, everything remained behind in storage.
Much of that mini-mountain of stuff I’ve been dragging with me from home to home, city to city, each time I moved over the last few decades. It’s quite a bit of stuff!
So now since I’ve moved, I’ve been living with relatively few possessions. (By American standards anyway, and certainly far fewer possessions than I surrounded myself with in my last home.)
The experience has been eye opening.
My day to day life with this minimal subset of possessions is as rich and full as it ever was when I had all my possessions around me. During these months, I’ve discovered I didn’t have with me some thing I needed or wanted only a mere handful of times. So the question arises: If I can go without all that stuff and be as content as when it’s around, then why do I own all that stuff? Are most of those possessions then just unnecessary complications? Are the experiential insights I’m having now keys to further simplifying my life?
Eventually I’ll return to retrieve my belongings. But when I do, I believe this time away from them will make parting with the things I don’t really need or that don’t have special sentimental value easier than it was before. When I was packing them all away into storage, I intended to simplify, and I did manage to part with some things, but still each and every thing that went into storage seemed like something I couldn’t bear to part with. My experience now is teaching me to question this lingering attachment.
One last, unrelated thing: Recently, Walking the Black Dog featured a moving, thought-provoking post called Removing the arrow. In it the author discusses, in an extremely personal way, difficulties and depression that has arisen from family relationships, and he shares his insights and questions as well as discussing the value of asking, a la Albert Ellis, “Why Not?” and the Buddhist parable from which the post’s title is derived. Highly recommended.