Things / Marie Kondo and the Privilege of Clutter
2016 03 30 | journal
Marie Kondo and the Privilege of Clutter
I've been thinking of how little things actually mean to me in the sense of mementos. When my grandparents passed, I didn't want - actually, didn't need - to keep things to remember them by. It was not things that made memories, nor were things representative of people, relationships, nor what made knowing a person worth remembering. Over the years, I've said to my friends that I didn't want things as gifts, I wanted experiences, because those things made better memories. Things are all right to keep when you have someone to pass them on to who can use or treasure them; but, since I don't have children, there's no one to pass heirlooms on to.
Now, with my mother's passing, the same thoughts cross my mind - that there's little I need to keep in the nature of things in order to remember her, that in a lot of ways I'd be happier giving things away than I would be keeping them. I have seen too many ugly things happen within a family when someone passes, or when there's a divorce, to ever want to be territorial about material goods.
While I've been given some wonderful gifts over the years, the best gifts anyone has ever given me, weren't about things at all.
My grandmother was a terrible hoarder in a way - not psycho level hoarding, just a sort of keeping-it-because-it-could-be-useful hoarding of growing up in a household of too many people during the depression. She kept the oddest mementos as well - a wax candle shaped like a seal that I bought at Marine Land when I was in grade school, First Communion certificates from my aunts and uncles, old purses, empty Avon perfume bottles from the 70s… just stuff. I picked that bad habit up from her, but have long since gotten over it.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like a sterile environment, but I've de-cluttered an awful lot over the years.