Posts
Henry David
Thoreau once wrote, "Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify,
simplify, simplify!
I have a
t-shirt that I bought at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau's one-time home. Yes, there's a
gift shop now, with a view of the pond.
The t-shirt says only, "Simplify, simplify," and I wear it when
I go to yard sales, flea markets and the like, to try to remind myself not to
buy every useless item that catches my eye.
One flaw in that theory is that I can't see the shirt when I'm wearing
it, and if the vendor reads it, they'll be encouraged to get rid of the item they
can tell I'm coveting.
If I'm a
hoarder, it is only of the little things (sounds like a book title, doesn't
it? The
Hoarder of Little Things). No, I
don't have head-high stacks of old papers and magazines that I really do mean
to get around to reading someday: I recycle my paper stuff regularly. No, I don't have cans of soup that are as old
as my daughter (although some of my spices have sentimental value and probably
taste like dust by now). My biggest
problem is the endless accumulation of small items that must have seemed
important at some point, and that I can't seem to toss. They cover our most of our horizontal
surfaces, and they keep multiplying.
Periodically I toss them into a box, which then sits there for a
while. If I get really frustrated, I put
the box somewhere else—in a little-used bedroom or even in the attic. But you will notice that I don't throw it
away.
I'm
thinking about this now because (as I have said in various places more than
once) I just came back from a trip to Ireland, where I spent ten days in a
relatively new cottage (if you can call a four-bedroom stone house with a
Jacuzzi a cottage). The owner bought the
property and several others around it to graze his cattle—he's a dairy
farmer—but he carved out a patch from each of two properties to build a new
house on, intended for sale. He and his
teenage sons built them themselves, and they did a great job. Then the Irish economy
tanked, so he rents out one, and the other one sits unfinished.
Our rented
cottage had all the essential furnishings—beds, couches, a satellite
television, and a well-equipped kitchen.
What is did not have is "stuff"—all those accumulated items
that drive me crazy at home. Horizontal
surfaces were clear. There were only a
few pictures on the walls, and even fewer rugs.
There were no "things" everywhere. And I didn't feel that it was sterile and
impersonal; I felt that it was clean and simple. It was a relief. That made
coming home all the harder, because I was so aware of my own clutter.
This past
week I had lunch with a few mystery writer friends. One is moving to a new city, leaving behind
her home of many years and settling into an apartment. She's wrestling daily with what to throw
away, what to keep, what to take with her.
The rest of us around the table have moved at some time in our lives,
and we're all fighting creeping clutter, so we know all too well what she's
talking about. We laughed when we all
admitted that we keep buying storage boxes, hoping that shifting the
"stuff" from one place to another, even putting a label on it, will
make things better. The friend who is
moving is shredding a lot of old papers; no one else admitted to owning a
shredder. Me, I've still got my
grandmother's cancelled checks in the attic—I'm sure there's a story waiting in
there somewhere, a biography of my grandmother based on where she shopped in
the grand department stores of New York.
My writing
space is a mess. There, I've admitted
it. I save items that interest me, that
I hope might someday find their way into a book—but I never know where to file
them, so they sit in a pile, and then I move the pile, and then they're
lost. There must be a better way.
Simplify! (And all suggestions welcome!)
