Storage

What do Matthew the gospel writer, Mary Oliver the poet, and Marie Kondo the author have in common? They all have some profound things to say about stuff. What kind of stuff? Well it depends on your perspective. As George Carlin noted, "You have sh*t. I have stuff."

Let's start with the sublime and work our way down to the ridiculous. "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Matthew 19:21). If this sentiment ran the world, it would fix all our social and economic ills. Some things seem important to me not based on their merit, but because I do them. Do people really need to know a lot of calculus and statistics? Well, because I treasure my career teaching those topics, it sure does seem like they need to know. My heart is definitely there. What if we put our treasure into improving health care, living conditions, nutrition, and other worthy things to show that our heart is with the welfare of our fellow humans?  I don't know if Matthew was suggesting such a virtuous lifestyle or simply stating the fact that if people did it, it would be really great.

Mary Oliver describes moving and not having room for all of her stuff. She rented a storage unit and left her possessions there for years. Then, "As I grew older the things I cared about grew fewer, but were more important" so one day she called a trash man to to come take everything away then she wrote the poem "Storage" about it. It reminded me of the weird feelings of both sadness and relief as I watched my parents' estate sale offer up millions of items. There's no way to transfer sentimentality, which turns valuation on its head. Seeing mementos of fun times sold for a quarter can be jarring to say the least, but I was also very happy to know that I wasn't going to have to assume the care and dusting of all that stuff. Which brings us to Marie Kondo. As a side note, I bought her book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up immediately after I read the first review of it, and this was long before Netflix found her. Not that this matters, but it kind of does to me. Anyway, her ideas of holding on loosely to our possessions and keeping only the ones that "spark joy" struck a chord with me. When parting with the ones that don't make the cut, her suggestion is to be grateful even to the point of thanking the item for serving whatever purpose it was that brought it into the house in the first place. Spring cleaning with gratitude seems like an excellent plan to me. Or as Mary Oliver put it, "Make a beautiful fire!"