stuffs.

So I started the "stuff" clean-out.

This week, I dropped off some former possessions at the Goodwill. Maybe they’ll find adoptive parents who will be better than I have. I don’t even remember ever deciding to take them on as my dependents. They just happened. But somewhere along the line, all those things became stuff, and lost my respect.

Most of us live amidst stuff. We do have a few things too — well-used, well-enjoyed, and well-respected items that have an established place in my life. But most of it is stuff.

Stuff makes us feel bad. It fills the mind with fading hopes about what we might one day do with it, taunts us with our obvious inability to manage it, and gives us the ominous sense that we’re losing track of something crucial, either in the physical mess of stuff itself, or in the mental mess it creates in our heads.

I don’t want stuff anymore, only things.

My coffee table in the center of my living room is a thing.

My set of old plates, which sit on the shelf above the nice plates I actually use, are stuff.

My new double-wall drink cup, only two weeks old but already a close companion, is a thing.

My Pirates of the Caribbean Jigsaw puzzle, which I got as a gift and immediately loved the idea of — but never assembled — is stuff.

I donated about a hundred pounds of stuff this weekend. Sometimes it’s sad to get rid of some items, particularly if you had high hopes for them, if they were a gift, or if you associate them with someone you miss.  I won't even go into the sentimentality of baby stuff....

But how much sadder is it to hoard something in your home for years for some inane psychological reason, without actually putting it to use or giving it a proper place?

If I’m going to own an item, the least I could do is be a good parent to it. And the most fundamental responsibility of a parent is to give your children a decent home.

Stuff doesn’t usually have a home. Items of stuff are transients, surviving day-by-day in a temporary stack somewhere, leaning sadly against a garage wall, or sleeping in the darkness of a junk drawer, never sure of their fate or purpose. A particularly fortunate piece might get a chance to hibernate in a half-full cardboard box in the storage room, with some other hard-luck outcasts.

I will not be a cat-lady with my things anymore, taking on more and more tenants I can’t take care of. I don’t have them all because I love them, I accumulate them because I don’t love them.

We’ve all heard the adage, “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” I have yet to meet a person who actually lives this reality. But now I think it is the only sane way to live, and I’m determined to make it my reality. I will eliminate homelessness from my home. If there is anything in your home that does not have a home — a place where it can be properly, officially put away, then I dare say you are taking it for granted. If you can’t bother to even give it a home, either its value is lost on you, or it has none.

The truth is most of us don’t have enough space in our homes to give our possessions the self-respect of having a permanent address. We have too much, and this undermines our gratitude for each possession.

So... I urge you to join me, and eliminate homelessness from your home. I imagine your poor, unemployed stuff would too, if it had a voice. Which it probably does. Cause I KNOW you've all seen Toy Story.