Storage
Today I made progress with my Storage Reduction Project. I located and scanned a few of my tax returns from the early 2000s. I before today scanned into PDF, and shredded, the returns for 1969 through 1999.
It is somehow ironic and absolutley perfect that I am so steeped in this storage reduction project in these early months of my retirement. I am touching everything I own and deciding to physically keep / digitally archive / physically shred / sell / donate / recycle or commit to trash each and every item. I know now that my grandmother was not really a hoarder as much as she was trying to anchor and secure her past and all that she experienced. At the same time she did keep a lot of things. Part of what drove that mindset was her generation’s experience with The Great Depression and the rationing of World War II. Her wealth was the physical world of items but more specifically real estate. Her identity was her homestead and all of the things thereabout.
I am no different really. I no longer have my inherited part of the homestead, but I have the abstract of title for all that land, as well as architectural plans for the duplex home my grandmother built there in 1931. I no longer have the townhouses I developed in 1984, but I have the offering brochure and the architectural plans. Today I have a small storage space in Texas, a large one in Brooklyn, as well as an apartment, also in Brooklyn, that contains the last of her, my mother’s, my children’s, and of course my, stuff.
I have things that are very important to me, things that aren’t, and things that are in between. In the big picture, none of it really matters. If I died today, none of it would really be of much value to anyone else. It would only be something for my children and ex-wife to dispose of.
Yet it all matters a great deal to me in this lifetime. It is all, finally, very important to me. This storage reduction project is akin to a woodworking task, where one sands with paper of very coarse to very fine grit. I am sanding my world, my definition down to a level of efficiency as small and with as few scratches as I can possibly attain in this lifetime. It is a must, a vision, a quest even, to get my world inventoried, recorded, archived, organized, cleaned, and cleared. As I do this project, I find there is much that I don’t remember having. It is the uncovering of my Life Story. It is a quest to discover who I really am or thought myself to be, to uncover the me that is defined by all this stuff. It occurs to me that I can take photos of things that I let go of, keeping them without taking up only virtual space. I am doing that with the scanning before shredding of the tax returns. The original thing no longer exists but a digital record of it does. It can be revisited, viewed and searched and printed but it is gone and transformed into millions of tiny pieces, a strange cremation. Finally there will be me, in a box, taking up space, at a spot in the ground somewhere.
I can kind of understand why ancient kings had the things, as well as sometimes the people and animals that were close to them, entombed with them. You never know when you might need them.
I can see why, at the other end of the scale, the Zen monks, I am told, have little or no worldly possessions to avoid attachment as much as humanly possible.
I am neither king nor monk. Yet I am sympathetic to both of these points of view on the gauge and fall somewhere more toward the material world mindset of the king and am trying to move the needle more toward the spiritual efficiency of the monk.
Either way I need to do this project while not obsessing on its completion by a specific point in time in order to be successful. I just need to do it. There is nevertheless some urgency, or perhaps an eagerness, to see how this endeavor will transform me. This is not simply spring cleaning, although it includes it. This is a physical reckoning that will hopefully bring about Spiritual Awakening, a meaningful alteration in my reaction to life, most of all, Peace of Mind.