Purge

Over the years, H and I have gone from being two people living in two apartments to one couple living in one small apartment. This has involved various accommodations for our stuff.  As someone who has moved in with a girlfriend in the past only to have it fizzle leaving me to sleep on a friend's couch because I did not have a bed, I was reluctant to suggest that we get rid of stuff in the beginning. So we had two sets of a lot of things for a time; one in the apartment and one in storage. As George Carlin states, we ended up with "too much stuff".

Some of these resolved themselves. TV's, DVD players, pots and pans... with all of these we have gone through the initial, the spare, and acquired a new one. Most things, however, required a purge. Since H and I have been together, we have moved six times. Each time has required an evaluation of stuff and a truckload or two of trips to Goodwill or selling things on Craigslist. We've done what I feel is pretty good job of whittling the stuff down. I'm more of a minimalist than H, so we have power struggles about bringing new things into the home vs reducing what we have, but for the most part I figured we had made our last mega donation trip.

We did not, however, account for a third person.

Faced with the reality that we HAVE to make more space, we are now in the midst of a possession purge that is truly brutal. So far we have taken this ruthlessness to books. Long ago we got rid of unfullfilling novels bought on whims, books we didn't really like that much, duplicates, and textbooks that were useless or outdated. More recently we had gotten rid of books we only kind of liked as well as textbooks and informational books that we were logically never going to use. Now we cut dangerously close to the emotional quick.


I really enjoyed "The Darksword" trilogy at one time, but I have not bothered to re-read it and there are other trilogy's I have re-read that I would rather keep... so into the bin it goes. "Healing the Soul in the age of the Brain" was an eye opening read and I loved it, but honestly I will never read it again... so into the bin it goes. Yes, I am very happy that I read "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", but the truth is, I'm mostly hanging on to it as proof that I did read it... so into the bin it goes.


Coincidentally, there is a lightness that comes about from shedding these possessions. After the pain of choice, the pain of getting rid of them, and the anxiety of having lost them, there comes the relief. The sigh you make upon seeing an empty shelf, ready to house children's books.

And then, on to the closet...