I have an urgent desire to shed myself of goods and chattels.
The acquisitions of a fortunate life have accumulated like an overflowing email inbox and simply must be dealt with while I am alive, and not left to my children to wrangle when they’ll (hopefully, long down the track) be grieving.
Books and journals. Especially books and journals! CDs. Clothes. Piles of e-waste. Drawers of kitchen utensils rarely used. Pens! How many pens does a household need?! Then there’s my non-digital archive – dozens of notebooks, clipped articles, jottings and research material spanning almost 40 years in journalism and authorship of 10 books. All must be culled while I have the wherewithal.
My parents, well into their 80s when they could no longer live quite so independently, were extricated from a family home that was not only decaying around them – but jam-packed with stuff.
Every cupboard and each drawer in every room was full. I recall the house was already overflowing with things when my mum and dad were in their early 70s and an older aunt died … and left everything to my father. He seemed to take it all. Think bad ceramic figurines and other knick-knacks, dozens of tea towels, doilies (to which I have a visceral aversion), white goods and old televisions (straight into the double garage to accompany the kitchen cupboards and sink that had been replaced in my parents’ 1970s renovation), yet another dining set and countless books mostly about British royals and the Irish famine (go figure!).
In fairness to our parents, their house also harboured the childhood detritus of their progeny. School books and uniforms. Other clothes. Obsolete sporting goods. Leads and blankets and baskets – even food – for long dead, fondly remembered pets.
Circumstances dictated we deal with Mum and Dad’s belongings when they downsized to a smaller, safer and more manageable home while they still had acuity a few years before they died. I’m sure the great shedding of things felt like something of a liberation for them – although Dad did keep retrieving items from the skip.
We’ve just been through this process again with another close relative who is less conscious of what’s happening. It’s been a distressing, painful, even traumatic process – a form of intense grieving, really, for a loved one still living.
Anyway, it has delivered me to this place of reflection where I must further declutter and liberate myself from stuff. A starting point, of course, is to curb consumption; to “just stop buying shit’’ as a mate who recently dramatically downsized puts it.
Do I really need to replace my phone every two years? Could my next laptop be recycled rather than brand new?
To that end, I’ve started borrowing from the library rather than buying books and as I look about the shelves all around me right now, I’m wondering if so many of the beloved titles I see but haven’t read in years might better serve other readers. Perhaps if I haven’t reread a book inside three years it should go? If I need it again, I can always borrow it.
Thoughts of legacy become more poignant with age. What of true importance will I leave behind – beyond landfill? Will my kids’ sadness be compounded by their guilt for cursing me while they throw the detritus of my life into skips or recycle what they can at thrift shops?
All of these thoughts are, of course, knotted up with issues of global, national and community economic and social injustice in a world where the homeless, starving and oppressed – people who’ve literally had everything taken from them – are omnipresent.
With that in mind, it’s got to be far better for the privileged to leave this world with less. To give it away to those who might use and value it – and to otherwise diminish our stuff well before we expect to die.
• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
