Less

On giving away half my stuff

A couple of weeks ago, I gave away half the things I owned. I wept with shame and with relief. There are few greater lessons in honesty and humility than going through all your stuff and deciding between ‘necessary’ and ‘not’.

My best friend loaded the van while I stood in the street and watched. Her kind, familiar face spoke of a determined, cheerful matter-of-factness about it all that helped, a lot, as if it wasn’t a big deal, as if people emptied their lives and their houses of shame all the time. I covered my face and accepted her hug and thought, “Never again. Never again will I hoard so much for myself,” because that is what I’ve been doing, a dragon wrapped around her mountain.

I am preparing for a move that may or may not need to happen. I am responding to a call inside my body that I don’t yet quite understand. What I do know for sure is that I have spent over twenty years in this one small house and through each of those twenty years, money has been scarce and I have grabbed onto things when I could afford them like they were food, like they were things I needed to eat to stay alive, and then I’ve held onto them, however pointless and low value they were, because I was afraid if I let them go I’d be left with nothing much, and nothing much did not feel safe, not safe at all. 

Everything I bought was cheap, easily worn out, easily broken. Periodically, I would purge to feel better but the space soon filled up again with more cheap things. Now I’m moving closer to nothing much on purpose, in response to need and change and this strange new pull in my heart, a call like a drumbeat: “less less less, please less.” Of course, much remains here, still — too much, perhaps. I eye it gently now, wondering what else will need to go.

I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about what the world might ask of me when the time comes; what it might already be asking more loudly than we all choose to hear; what it will only go on asking, louder and louder. The answer that keeps coming is that it will need me to give things up. Not everything, I don’t think, but more than feels easy. I can’t see how any other future is possible. I don’t think anyone who believes love shouldn’t involve sacrifice can ever have really tried it properly, and I do love this world, I do.

We all say we want the world to change until we need to go without something and then, we all know, the truth comes out. I’ve fidgeted and avoided and forced myself to eat that truth, watching the news, reading reality, horrified to notice that often my reaction has simply been to turn back to hungrily accruing more, instantly trying to cement my little orb of obsessed-over status and growth. Is that really what I’m going to focus on when the world is hurting? When things can’t continue like this?

We have, in the West, pushed the world more and more to its limit, demanded more and more of the people we decided didn’t count, and a reckoning is coming, of course it is, the answer to which can only be less less less in some way, a reckoning for those who have always taken, who continue to rest their lifestyles on the back of a broken world and broken people — me included. And that is terrifying when you've always been somewhat at the bottom of the pile, but perhaps may be more frightening for those at the top, those used to their more more more and quite happy with it thank you. In fact I think they will — I will, you will — fight change tooth and nail, are already fighting it tooth and nail, and with that, the idea of giving things up voluntarily in a free-fall, good-natured act of willingness, as a way of saying yes yes yes to this unspoken ask, suddenly felt like the most laughingly simple, brilliantly freeing, right thing to do. Especially when things feel scarce and fragile: especially then.

I do not know the answers to my problems or yours, but I think turning away from amassing more stuff is a start. I think choosing to live with less now, before it’s absolutely necessary, might be sane, wild, gorgeous. And if and when the time comes that the world asks me to give up something more, then perhaps, maybe, I’ll be ready, or at least more ready than I was. I'll have trained for this. I’ll be well practised in living simply, with only what I need. 

It turns out that comfort is still right here, as available as it was when I owned twice as much. That comfort is somehow easier to feel now: how lucky I am. Bombs aren’t falling on my head. My stomach isn’t empty. I lie in my warm bed in my hollowed out room and think about what it might mean to stop always steering my life in the direction of more. More comfort, more success, more entertainment, more speed, more status, more and more convenient ease, more things. If I choose instead to stick to a small portion, can I learn to enjoy it fully? To sink deeply into the experience of it? Do I need to visit a jaw-dropping forest of blossoming cherry trees when I can raise my face and my heart to the one growing untidily in my neighbourhood and perhaps know that one better still? In some respects, I think this has been the big question I’m here to explore, the question I wrote a whole book about. I think too, that I’m here to learn that choosing less often is safe. It is — all that extra stuff was protecting me from fuck all. And that is perhaps why I wept so much when I gave it all away, because I realised that at last.

With much less stuff, I can finally see what I have clearly. I find myself touching things, pausing, thinking about where it came from, our shared history, what it’s made from, who must have made it. Everything feels a little more alive, a little more connected. Everything feels important in a new way, and I think, yes, yes, I think this is better. Not the answer, but a start.

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