Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [37]
If web publishing isn't quite your style, gather some friends and tell your stories as a way of bidding things farewell. You may find that it often isn't the physical souvenir itself that holds the importance of the story. Get together for a low-key show-and-tell brunch and share the stories of your things, and then have everyone hop in the car and donate all these items you've honored. You’ll help others, learn more about your friends, and freshen those favorite old memories while clearing space in your home for your present and future life.
Telling these stories and then letting go can work very well in combination with a project like Discardian Erin Hare’s “31 Things Out of the ____” sprint on basements, attics, etc., or designer Randy Rettig’s “Less 365.” Whether you let go by the month or the year, say farewell to some physical encumbrances and acknowledge your journey so far.
Consider digitizing the things you have on display in your home. If your house should ever suffer damage, it's nice to know that you have a backup digital copy as well as one you can easily access on the web. Of course, you can do this with little tchotchkes, too. Don't really want to keep that epic collection of refrigerator magnets, but want to remember the glory days when it covered the entire front surface of your fridge? Take some photos, maybe keep a handful of favorites, and sell the rest at your next yard sale. (Just don't set the bag of ’em next to the hard drive where you have all those backups, okay?) Take this approach with any physical stuff that is more about the emotion than the thing.
Collections and change
Got a whole lot of one kind of thing? What if 90% of that collection went away? Purge that which accumulates by habit—clipped articles, mugs, fancy condiments—but which you wouldn't replace if starting fresh today. Examine those masses of things you keep that all go together and see how many of the set you still use or enjoy.
The waffle irons of our souls
Before we move on, let’s take note of some things that may not at first glance seem to be part of the “Museum of Me” but that definitely hold an emotional load, making it harder to part with them.
Writing can have a profound impact upon us. Essayist Joseph Epstein said, “Reading is experience. A biography of any literary person ought to deal at length with what he read and when, for in some sense, we are what we read.”
Add to this the similarly shaping powers of music and film. We cling to the physical shells of these formative experiences—books, CDs, videos—as though they were pieces of our identity itself. We even do this with media which we we do not intend to re-experience anytime soon, if ever.
If you’re not going to reread that book every few years, isn’t there a less space-invasive way to represent your life history as a reader than keeping it? If you never put on that music but prefer instead to have it randomly appear in your life—on the radio, perhaps, or playing in a store—then why keep a copy of it when someone else could enjoy that copy? If you aren’t inclined to watch that movie again for a decade or so, why keep it in its current form when movie formats have changed at such a rapid pace in the last 20 years? It is the experiences—not the objects—that we are trying to preserve. Tell your stories. Acknowledge your influences. Let your old snakeskins go.
The big impermanence
The last and biggest fallacy of maintaining the “Museum of Me” is the notion that your body will serve you some purpose after you die.
Illustration by Randall Munroe, xkcd. Used by blanket permission. [Mouseover text: “Dad, where is Grandpa right now?”]
Identify yourself as an organ donor and let your family know that you want to have your body parts distributed to someone who needs them after you die. Learn more at organdonor.gov or search for a similar resource in your country if you're outside the United States.
Think and talk about your preferences in life and death. As