Decluttering

Once upon a time, I was dating a very nice young man who lived near Monterey, CA.  He was renting a downstairs room from a family who was originally from India.  They were pretty friendly with each other; enough so that when the wife took a class that required her to interview someone from another culture, she asked my boyfriend if she could interview him.  The conversation began with her asking him about growing up American, and then turned to her experience moving to the US as a young adult.

One of the things that she mentioned was how much space and how much stuff American's have.  One thing he related to me that she had said was this: "In India, our houses are one tenth as big as houses here, and we have all of our family living with us - parents, grandparents, brothers, children.  It's very crowded, and we don't have privacy.  No one has their own room.  If we lived like this where I come from, we would be looked down on, like we're trying to live above our station.  And we have one-tenth the possessions.  So we have one tenth the space, and one tenth the possessions, but we are ten times happier than any American I have met."

Now, I'm sure she was exaggerating to some extent.  And she and her husband were here alone, away from their families with a plan to move back to India some day.  So maybe she was feeling nostalgic for home.  In any case, that story reminds me of one of the tenets of Buddhism: unhappiness comes from attachments to things, people, desires, etc. (Tanha).  

After my mom passed away, I had this very strong desire to purge my belongings.  We have a large house relative to where my husband and I have lived before, and despite not needing the extra space we filled it up with extra stuff.  It's to the point that the house looks completely cluttered for no reason other than not having a place to put everything.  In the middle of my grief, all of my things disgusted me.  The garage full of boxes of books and papers, outdated electrical cords, bed frame, crib, sleeping bags, Christmas decorations all seemed so useless.  I wanted to go in and take it all to the dump.

After the grief began to fade some, the desire to rid myself of the extraneous stuff did not.  With the loss of my mother, it seems as though a lot of my sentimentality left, too.  All of the things that I thought I had to keep just didn't seem to be so important anymore.  What did it matter that I still had the American Girl doll that I used to love when I was 12?  Why did I need 3 boxes of books in the garage, packed away and useless?

So I've been decluttering.  In the last two days my husband and I have managed to get rid of 5 boxes of things in the garage, several dresser drawers, and some broken electronics.  We still have a long way to go, but it's already making me feel strangely lighter.  With less junk hanging around it's almost as though I can breathe easier.  It's a difficult process, but it does help thinking, "When we move, or if the house burns down, will I really miss this?"  99% of the time if it's something that has been packed away for 2 years, the answer is a definite, "No."

I'm not interested in fully tackling tanha.  But it does feel great to cut loose some of the clutter that has been tying me down.