COVETING MATERIAL STUFF; EXCESSES; LIFE INVENTORY

The title is somewhat misleading since it started in the Great Depression when wants and deprivation were the only excesses. For every action, there is a reaction...so say laws of physics. When someone is deprived, reaction is likely to be that there will be an attempt to live life so that a repeat of that wanting or sense of no control will not reoccur.

Many of those of us, Great Depression survivors, became pack rats. I hold onto things because 'I might need them later, if not at this moment' and because I could never replace them (clearly because they are so obsolete!). In today's world of built in obsolescence, it may be fear that you will never find the source for 'it' or' them' again or that too many companies will stop making that favorite product; 'it' dies and no one is making replacements or it costs more to fix it than 'it' is worth or you lack money with which to pay. While some replacements are an improvement, many are not and we must live with the memory of having had something to cherish (like a lover before losing that lover forever). A superfluity may gradually result. As George Carlin may have described it, I'm drowning in stuff.

People, you learn, come and go in your life. Some you will miss and some you will quickly forget, pushing into that part of your memory where they are brought forward only when someone else reminds you of them for a brief spot of time, then quickly recede into that vague storage place in your brain again.

Trying to hold onto things, I have taken pictures, bought 78s, then LPs, then CDs, and loads of sheet music. I bought a VCR and filled hundreds of tapes. I put some 78s onto reel to reel tape, copied a few favorites onto audio cassettes, and a few of those onto CDs. Pictures were printed, some slides, many of them digitized and it would have gone on to my becoming brain dead if I had not had an epiphany. I recalled my husband telling me that one could not capture and hold everything (That is not when I gave up trying to, though). The great picture that was missed must be a head picture, as he called it. The epiphany made me realize that I don't have to hold onto everything from my past. There will be new friends, foods, products, music, books and enough of anything else that is important to me.

Taking a life inventory shows me that I now have enough unwatched DVDs, unlistened to CDs, unread books, and food stored in the house that, if I bought nothing for the rest of my life, neither my body nor mind would starve. A new freedom from wanting has settled to a feeling of ease within...at last, I have enough...for now. Now my problem is how to get rid of enough of it to make my living space less of a blivet. (If you've read my blog before, you know that a blivet is stuffing three pounds of excrement in a two pound bag.)