Last time we went on holiday I realised that the great sigh of relief I felt when we got to the apartment was as much about its relative emptiness as about having finished the journey. Wow, I thought. If I go on holiday partly to get away from my possessions, then surely when I get home, I can get rid of 80% of everything and feel on holiday all the time! I came home determined. And I can't do it.
Some of the stuff is sentimental and charged with tenderness. Some of it is beautiful and gives me daily joy. But really a great deal of it just might-come-in-handy-one-day. This final category is both hardest to defend and hardest to control. So what is it about, really?
For a start: the might-come-in-handy stuff does, in fact, come in handy. I recently re-covered dining room chairs with material stashed for more than a decade. Like advertising, more than half of might-come-in-handy stuff is pointless, but nobody knows which half.
To continue: it's recycling: I have stuffed several craft projects over the years with the insides of an old duvet kept for that purpose.
And finally, like Walt Whitman, 'I am large, I contain multitudes'. I go off some clothes, craft techniques, sports, and then a few years later, I take them up again. Keeping stuff is a way to hang on to options. My collection of tools and materials is the first stage of work on future projects, many of which have not yet broken the surface of consciousness. The stuff is in my mind, as well as my house.
A commonly used creativity technique takes two apparently unrelated objects challenging you to make connections. My stuff gives me that work out all the time. I'm writing at my desk, and it presents me with supermarket vouchers, a pine cone, loom bands, some pebbles, felt pens, a little resin sculpture, lego, and other items. Some offer memories, some remind me of plans and some I just seem to have hung onto. They all become talismans connecting me to ideas and emotions, including some only half-conscious ones which as they can't be explicitly noted down would otherwise trickle away.
Whenever a talisman pops up in my visual field, a bunch of associated thoughts and feelings get a little charge of attention. They are briefly introduced to whatever I'm thinking about at the time. My home is thus an extension of my brain, and I am thinking in it outside my head; layering plans, memories and symbols together.
To continue: it's recycling: I have stuffed several craft projects over the years with the insides of an old duvet kept for that purpose.
And finally, like Walt Whitman, 'I am large, I contain multitudes'. I go off some clothes, craft techniques, sports, and then a few years later, I take them up again. Keeping stuff is a way to hang on to options. My collection of tools and materials is the first stage of work on future projects, many of which have not yet broken the surface of consciousness. The stuff is in my mind, as well as my house.
A commonly used creativity technique takes two apparently unrelated objects challenging you to make connections. My stuff gives me that work out all the time. I'm writing at my desk, and it presents me with supermarket vouchers, a pine cone, loom bands, some pebbles, felt pens, a little resin sculpture, lego, and other items. Some offer memories, some remind me of plans and some I just seem to have hung onto. They all become talismans connecting me to ideas and emotions, including some only half-conscious ones which as they can't be explicitly noted down would otherwise trickle away.
Whenever a talisman pops up in my visual field, a bunch of associated thoughts and feelings get a little charge of attention. They are briefly introduced to whatever I'm thinking about at the time. My home is thus an extension of my brain, and I am thinking in it outside my head; layering plans, memories and symbols together.
Sometimes I want to escape to the purity of a single note, a sparsely furnished holiday home, and a great empty sea horizon. It's restful. But it's good to come back to the complexity and richness of a life which has a past, a future, and a multi-stranded present.
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