One of my favorite standup routines by comedian George Carlin was his take on stuff. You know, all the important things that make your life whole, that you cannot live without. Even the stuff that you may not need every day, or even once a year, is still your stuff, right? Carlin was a genius at using a simple concept to illuminate so much about our lives.
I am reminded of his hilarious take on our worries about our stuff when my wife and I try to clean up around our home. Why are we keeping so many cardboard boxes around? I mean, we get several new ones every week from Amazon. Even the cat has more boxes than she can possibly need. But if you remove one, she wanders around looking for it.
I mean, you do have to chuckle sometimes when you realize that perhaps keeping all of those plastic containers, boxes, and old clothes that you don’t wear anymore, is just a bit much. Part of Carlin’s point was that your house is a pile of stuff with a cover on it, and that when you fill it up, you need a bigger house. And then there is your closet. Yeah, when was the last time you wore that shirt or those shoes?
I inherited a bit of a curse about keeping stuff from my grandfather, a depression era carpenter that reused nails and boards whenever needed. He had tin cans full of odd nails, screws, bolts, and other tidbits leftover from a job or found on the road that may yet be used to build something. I too cannot leave an odd nail or screw on the ground without putting it in my pocket.
I have my own collection of pieces of wood, nails and screws left over from projects. Yikes! I have spent far too much time arranging storage for these tidbits in my small shop. I may yet use them someday! And occasionally I do, but then I think, is it the right time to use them? I have had them for so very long that I have become attached to them.
On occasion I have tried to reduce that pile of wood pieces based on a suggestion in a woodworking magazine. Choose a minimum length of a piece of wood and toss anything shorter than that. But then I think, those small pieces could be used for … The struggle is real! But I have learned that if you do remove those pieces from your sight, they do fade from memory.
Then there are all of those boxes of your children’s stuff, left over from their childhood, placed in the attic. Yeah, they promise to come pick them up someday, but don’t want you to toss their stuff because they believe they are important. They can’t recall what stuff is there, but all of it must be kept.
Carlin was right about one thing; our stuff is important to us. What I think he may have been trying to say through humor was that much of our stuff is just not that important, otherwise, why is it put away in the first place. We just need to be brave, open those boxes of stuff, pick out the few that tug at our hearts, and drop off the rest at the local thrift store.
In that way, your stuff becomes someone else’s stuff. You are just using another house to store it.