Our Accumulated ‘stuff’ And Why We Never Let It Go

Throughout our life, we seem to be trying to act like little squirrels or pack rats, running around furiously collecting objects. In truth, are we ever able to let go of ‘stuff?’ Surely, we once had a need for that old dusty Yamaha acoustic guitar taking up space over in the living room but we just can’t remember why. For some reason, we find it hard to let go of much of anything we collect.

Maybe the thing was bought in some pawnshop back during the salad days — otherwise known as the ‘college experience’ — and it was never really used because there never seemed to be enough time to actually learn how to make the barre chords necessary to pick out the first few measures of Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water.’ For whatever reason, there it sits in the corner, now collecting dust.

A guitar — whether acoustic or electric — however, is kind of cool looking. One can’t say the same thing about a couple of wet dry vacuums, though. For sure, there’s bound to be someone out there who has collected a couple of them and now has them occupying a place of pride (or some musty, dusty corner) in a garage or basement somewhere on this planet. That fact can be taken to the bank.

Maybe the vacuum was going to be used to finally get a handle on the garage and the water leakage that sometimes resulted because we just never got around to applying new seals to the bottom of the garage door. At any rate, the days when we wanted to use such a powerful vacuum are probably now long gone and receding rapidly in the rearview mirror that we call our past life.

Giving people the benefit of the doubt is probably the best thing to do when it comes to their ‘stuff.’ Maybe these items bring back fond or pleasant memories of events gone by, though it would be hard to imagine why a busted tennis racket — which got that way deliberately — might bring back anything but the former anger that led to it getting busted. Or maybe we were imitating John McEnroe; who knows?

And let’s not get started on the children’s things. At one time cherry baby furniture was probably all the rage among the infant set (the kids, not the infantile parents) but it now should probably occupy a place in someone else’s home, giving some other infant or child just a bit of pleasure. What’s for sure is that the kids who wants needed it are graduated from college now, right?

This is why traveling through life with lots of ‘stuff’ can be a bit frustrating at times. We don’t trust that will be able to keep the memories we have in our heads so we cleave to items that we can touch, perhaps as a way to keep the memory that lay behind the item fresh in our minds even when we’ve been drawing so security checks for the last 20 or so years. What’s not to like about that?