This could be also called, "The Great Divestment".
If you read through one of my recent posts you know that my refrigerator is a reservoir of good advice. Well OK, the cat ones excepted. Two others that I see often because their import is more and more significant are these:
Albert Schweitzer: If you own something you can't give away, you don't own it. It owns you.
Kahil Gibran: Give now that the joy of giving may be yours rather than your inheritors.
I think of them and I remember the dumpster at the end of the driveway.
My friend, Malcolm, was a gin-swilling, skirt-chasing, magician, writer and general bon-vivant. It was a lifestyle that eventually did him in, especially the gin, although the skirt-chasing had often threatened earlier demise. His sister stayed with him through his final exit and then disposed of his stuff. He had a lot of stuff.
Her solution was to sell what little was saleable and order a dumpster bin for the rest. There it sat, at the end of his driveway, gradually accumulating his possessions that nobody else wanted. I snagged most of his magic paraphenalia before she had the house renovated, pretty well filling the dumpster, sold the place, and went away. The picture of the dumpster stayed with me.
I like to think that my possessions are too valuable to be just tossed into a landfill, but that advice about reciprocal ownership (my new word for the day) nags at me. Do I own the fishing flies (200+) or do they own me?
Friends in my fly-fishing fraternity have a favourite pasttime of asking one another, "What seven flies would you take if you were only allowed that many?" We name, for the most part, the same seven. So why do we have hundreds? Because we can.
And that pretty much sums up the reasons for ownership of much of what I own. The same answer could apply to clothes, tools, books (Hear that Vancouver? Ottawa?), artwork, stuff at the back of refrigerator shelves.
So, I'm lecturing myself here of course; you can listen in and take whatever you want. You can also take what you want from conversations Beverly and I have had and some of the solutions we have tried.
Give things away. Money, for starters.
The advice from the lawyer who prepared our wills 5 years ago was to eliminate all the little 1% for this charity and 2.5% for that charity and so on for a list of 8 organizations that we had drafted into a document. He said to eliminate the dribbles that would drive an execitor(trix) to drink by giving donations to organizations now and leaving the estate to people. I'm on it—late but I'm on it. They get some cash now in useful amounts, I get a tax break, my family gets more at the end.
Give things away. Clothes especially.
And no, we don't have to reduce our wardrobe to one pair of jeans and a T-shirt. I tried that but then I got married. I know the things I've shrunk out of or won't ever wear again (unless bell bottoms come back into … OK they're gone). But seriously, check the date today. Winter's coming on and there's someone living on the street who could really use a pair of heavy socks or a sweater. And there's some woman who's just escaped a terrible relationship and at the very least could use those little cosmetic trifles you've been accumulating from past trips.
Ask someone else to give your stuff away.
Really. I write books but I'm either just not good enough (hard truth) or haven't worked hard enough, to have a publisher, and the result is some cartons of books stashed in closets and under the bed. I now give copies away and each one goes with the understanding that the recipient doesn't need to keep it. They should pass it along. I hope they do.
Give valuable stuff to be auctioned.
Beverly has a lot of sculptures. Friends have commented on the fact that it is disconcerting to sit in our living room with so many small naked people looking down at them. Lately she has given some of her sculptures (You thought I was talking about kids, didn't you) to charities that were having silent auctions at their fundraising events. If the group can give a tax receipt for the item, so much the better, but don't let that determine your generosity.
And I'm sure there are more ways to engage in the Great Divestment. Tell me yours. I could use it.
Read my refrigerator, especially the quotation from Kahil Gibran.
Or put a big dumpster at the end of your driveway.