Recently, we embarked on a long overdue decluttering of our home.
Cheryl considers me a hoarder, a term I find hard to refute. I do sometimes see myself as an archivist of all things with future potential utility. I do keep the packaging from all my gadgets. Not just the box but also the documentation, receipts, inner cardboard scaffolding and yes, even the little silica gel packet that sternly warns DO NOT EAT, as if I had plan to live for a prolonged period of time in a sauna.
During this latest purge, I discovered that while I had run out of physical space, I had not fully run out of emotional attachment to these carcases that once held some glittering new toy. I emptied several pristine boxes only to carefully preserved their contents elsewhere. Pretty soon, I had to contend with what to do with a generous pile of cables and charges.
At moments like these, I tried to channel Marie Kondo and ask, “Does this spark joy?”
I posed this question while holding a dusty limited collector’s edition of Man of Steel 3D UHD 4K Blu-ray (plus bonus DVD). It was still sealed. The plastic wrap was intact, clinging to it like guilt of a boy who stole told her mother that he had finished his homework when he had been out cycling with his friends the entire afternoon.
Did it spark joy?
Well. Yes. Sort of. The delightful packaging itself sparked joy. The memory of buying it sparked joy. The fantasy of one day watching it in a perfectly calibrated home theatre sparked joy. But then, why didn’t I ever unwrap the damn thing?
That was when the thought popped up in my head that perhaps the joy was not in the owning, nor even in the using. It was in the acquiring.
In life, we often mistake motion for progress. We accumulate tasks, meetings, side projects, limited editions, believing that being busy is proof of meaning. The shelves steadily fill up; the calendar stealthy becomes littered with meetings; and somewhere along the way, the house where we were meant to live becomes storage space.
This time around, I decided to be impulsive in my disposal efforts fearing that the longer I reminisce about the object, the more heartstrings it will tug at. I threw out, donated or recycled most of what I’d kept. Out goes the baby cot our daughters once slept in. So too, the baby car seats. The old antivirus software boxes (goodbye, Norton AntiVirus, protector of a laptop that died in 2009), unceremoniously chucked into the recycling bag.
Each item left the house quietly, without protest. And the next morning, the sun still rose. No future emergency arose requiring a pristine Amazon Kindle box or a charger from a phone I no longer own. The world did not end because I discarded some clothes, packaging and unused furniture.
And here is the part that surprised me: the joy of the memories stayed.
The baby cot went, but the image of my daughters asleep, arms flung wide, dreaming of milk and impossible things, remained stubbornly, gloriously intact. The boxes disappeared, but the brief thrill of achievement they once represented faded into what it always was: a moment.
Perhaps spring cleaning is not about sweeping away bad luck. Perhaps it is about learning the difference between what holds our lives and what merely fills our shelves. We cannot stop ourselves from acquiring ambitions, objects, responsibilities but we can decide which ones we are willing to dust for the next ten years.
In the end, I did keep a few cables. I mean, I am not a monster.