Why I’m not a hoarder …

"... you can’t always choose 
what you inherit 
don’t always recognise 
the legacies 
planted in you 
germinating 
when you least expect ..."

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about de-cluttering, which to be fair, is a recurring theme in my life.  I’m not one of those people who feels the need to hang onto things that belonged to the people I’ve loved.  If my bookcases are full of books, it’s because they hold personal memories, or they are books I want to re-read.  I don’t hold onto something just because it was gifted or inherited from a loved one. I won’t keep things I no longer use just in case it comes in handy sometime in the future.  I’ll recycle, donate or bin it, depending on its condition.  

It’s suddenly become quite trendy to de-clutter.  The latest word for it is death-cleaning and having had to clear out rooms and whole houses belonging to loved ones who have died, that resonates.  But this is a not a new thing.  It was William Morris who said, “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”.  Not a bad starting point.

Don’t get me wrong: I still do have lots of things in my house that are neither useful nor beautiful.  It’s a work in progress and, given my husband is my polar opposite when it comes to stuff, it’s a battle of wills!  That’s a whole other story, which I won’t get into here.

I suspect that one of the reasons we hold onto stuff is that it belonged to someone we loved and we feel obliged to keep it.  Perhaps we think we have a duty to pass it on to the next generation.  But mostly I think we hold onto something because we believe we’re holding onto a part of the person we’ve lost.  It is a memento, that when we look at it and pick it up, makes us feel closer to our loved one.  I do understand that.  But what I’ve learnt over time is that I don’t need the object to bring the person closer.  The memory of them is already stored inside my head and heart, and I can bring it to the fore whenever I need or want to.  

This week’s poem came from a couple of recent experiences, which on the face of it are completely unconnected.  I love how a poem can channel a range of thoughts, experiences, and events through a single conduit.  I took part in a group exercise last month marking All Souls’ Day, the traditional day when we remember the dead.  We were invited to make a bracelet using old buttons, the idea being that each button would represent a loved one that you had lost.  I had this romantic notion of pulling out an old button box that might have belonged to my grandmother, which I have treasured since her death.  But that’s not the reality at all and it made me wonder about that yearning for connection I sometimes feel.  A tin of old buttons won’t make memories of my grannie any more real than the memories I already treasure and that’s the truth of it.  

Similarly, I spoke to a woman in Iceland who was so proud of the fact that her family had lived on the same farm in the east fjords for generations.  Her sense of place was so defined; she was firmly rooted in her family legacy.  That clearly works for her and, for a moment, it made me yearn  again for that same sense of connection to land and to family.  But what works for one person may not work for another.  In reality, I think the thing I most value about my upbringing was the sense of freedom my parents gave me to spread my wings and find my own flight path, and I absolutely have. 

I sense I’ve barely touched the surface of this theme of legacy as it’s made up of several layers, but I hope, by scratching the surface, it’s prompted you to ponder what kind of button box, real or virtual, you have hidden in a cupboard and what it represents.