Stuff

June 10 2011

Stuff.

Recently people in Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, and North Minneapolis Minnesota have been devastated by Tornados. Hundreds of people have died and thousands have lost loved ones. Tens of thousands of people have lost the stuff of their lives; homes, essentials for eating, dressing and work, and things that make them comfortable, bring joy and provide them with a sense of themselves.

People need stuff; for survival, for pleasure, for identity, for memories. But us homosapians also seem to have a tendency to collect, hoard, accumulate stuff that can hold us down.IT is hard for us to know when we have enough, when more is less, when to let go, when to share. Most of us don't have John McCain's problem - not knowing how many houses we own- but most of us do accumulate things that not only don't we need - but having them actually drags us down. That can happen even when there are other things we need and don't have ( like perhaps we could use one of McCain's houses because we are without but we have collected too many pens, because, you never know.).

As we talk to people about this trip, people tell us about their dreams, where they would go and what they would do with a year. More often than not, in one way or another, people cite stuff as the thing that keeps them from going. Stuff to organize , stuff to remove, stuff that must be dealt with before one can take off, stuff that is too expensive to store, too burdensome to sort through.

David and I like to think we are not that bad in stuff accumulation. Neither of us like to shop. We have been deliberately not accumulating for about five years now, since layoff number one, blah blah blah.

For the past nine months now, the primary - get-ready-for-the-trip activity has been dealing with stuff. Packing away, giving away, throwing away stuff that we forget about the minute it is out of sight. Among the stuff, are hundreds of pens and pencils, over a dozen staplers, same for scissors, ditto on skin cream, (weird since we don't use it much) and combs( yet I never have one) and unfilled photo frames. Hundreds of notebooks, many with one page written in them. Fourteen containers of floss, nine containers of partially-used suncreen. We wont talk about books, magazines, toys, (the kid is 21), and the gazillions of articles cut out of the newspaper and stuffed anywhere because they are SO important, but will never be found when needed. The floss and suncreen containers are going on the bikes - for penance, and because we dont want to pay for more of this stuff!

In one week we will begin a 14 month bike trip,traveling with all of our stuff on our bicycles: bed, house, food, clothing medicine cabinet, toiletries, work, amusment, and of course, transportation. We know we are immensely fortunate to be leaving a house in south Minneapolis, still full of stuff, for us to enjoy , or not, when we get back.