Even if you think you know...

One of the best pieces of philosophy I've heard from a tv series (Los Hombres de Paco):

"But even if you think you know how things should be, the reality is that things are simply how they are."

Of Spirit and Substance - Stuff

I have a complicated relationship with my stuff.  I love it – pretty much every little, underused, misunderstood, dusty and ignored piece of it.  I don’t want to get rid of it – that would feel both counterproductive (what if I need it later, and have to go out looking for something like it, when I could have just kept it here and had it at hand?) and disloyal (it’s given all this time to me, and what, I just throw it out? Like yesterday’s garbage?).  Just like I have a personal relationship with my truck, for example, I have a personal relationship with all my stuff.  Not that every relationship is well-maintained; but it is still there, and cherished.

At the same time, I have more stuff than I need or really want, and definitely more than I have space for.  This leads to a feeling that my stuff is clingy – always closer to me than I really want it to be – and demanding – taking up space that I would prefer to be using in other ways, making it hard for me to vacuum or even walk around my room sometimes -  and that, of course, signals a dysfunctional relationship (as if it hadn’t been signaled already). 

When my father died and I emptied out his house – which, by the way, was FULL of stuff, some of which I’m sure hadn’t been used, touched, or even though of for decades – I felt like I was freeing up some secret stockpile of energy, sending things out into the world where they could be used and loved instead of hidden away, imprisoned.  And look!  I’m doing the same thing, even with some of the same stuff!  (Yes, I kept some of his stuff.)

Just yesterday (she says proudly), I took a bunch of stuff to be recycled or reused – quite a volume of stuff, stuff that I could say with confidence I would not be using in the future.  But I still have a lot of stuff. 

It’s hard to imagine – but what if, as an experiment, I did something like got rid of some things I thought it possible I might use in the future.  Would the regrets be devastatingly overwhelming if I did indeed find myself wanting to use them later?  Might I forget that I had ever had such a thing, and feel no regrets?  Might the gain of having the extra space more than make up for whatever regrets I end up feeling?  Might it be just too destabilizing for me?  After all, my stuff holds my aspirations, my possibilities, my interests, my preparations, my quirks, my past, my personality – in some sense it defines me, and darned well keeps me defined.  What if I no longer had my stuff to tell me who I am, who I was, and who I might be?

What exactly is the relationship of substance - in this case, my stuff - to spirit, my spirit?  What does it say about who I am, how I make my appearance in the world?  Does it really hold potential?  Or is it more like quicksand, sucking down the possibilities of change?  Or is it entirely neutral - with perhaps my own attitudes about it all being either the repository of potential or quicksand?