Sorting your life's possessions is kinda like this! (This was what my partner took with him for a 4 month campaign with the Sea Shepherds)
In my past two years in the UK I’ve learned a great deal about letting go of and re-acquiring stuff, and that you really don’t need to buy most things new when you need them. First, in this blog, the letting go part. I’m originally from Canada and moved to Cambridge over two years ago. They let you take one suitcase with you on the plane (and it’s the weight of the suitcase, not the size that is the challenge!), and shipping is quite expensive so you have to limit yourself. It’s quite different from just moving house within the same city or even country, where it’s not too expensive to move things by ground. But in this case the move required a great deal of downsizing of my material posessions!
At first I had a really hard time sorting through everything bit by bit and deciding what should be sold, what should go into storage (in my mum’s basement, so definitely there was a cap on the amount that could be stored!), and what should come with me. There were items that were a wrench to part with, that I just said “ok, get rid of it, put it in the sale pile while I’m not looking!” though today I can’t even remember which items those might have been, and I’m sure they all have good homes now. Other items I thought, oh I can’t part with this or it would be really useful, but really I’m already past the weight limit: it’ll have to go into storage. And now? I can barely remember what I put in storage that then seemed so imporant! My favourite blanket at the time (I’ve since knitted my own), stuffed animals and clothes with sentimental value, a carefully crafed video collection (pretty useless now!) – I don’t sense their absence at all. And finally there’s the objects that made the cut and traveled over the Atlantic. Some were quite useful, such as clothes and shoes I still wear every day, some were frivoulous, just little pieces of one’s identity that I wanted to take with me, so that there was at least something familiar with me when my partner and I started our new lives in Cambridge. A pair of metal gobblets, a toy or two which were gifts from friends, a favourite book or two (which I could have easily found copies of here). But of all the stuff we’ve accumulated since then, these items blend in seamlessly and no longer have quite the strong emotional ties.
If you want to simulate the experience without moving very far, try this trick that a science teacher once taught me: take a box and fill it with things you don’t really use, or think you could get let go of but maybe aren’t quite sure. By “let go of” I mean recycling, selling or gifting hopefully, not necessarily throwing it away! Close up the box for a period of time, 3 to 6 months should be enough, and put it somewhere you can forget about it. If by the end of that period, you haven’t thought about what’s in the box, found a need for or can’t even remember what’s there until you open it, it may be time to clear a few things out! While that exercise when told to me by my science teacher was primarily intended to help you de-clutter your life, I think it could also give you a bit of perspective on the role that stuff plays in your life and how important or meaningful it really is to you. In turn the next time you go to make a purchase or acquire something new (or used), you may think twice about how useful you’re really going to find it.
The experience of moving overseas and downsizing my posessions to do so has taught me that we inadvertently get quite attached to “stuff” but that once you let go it really isn’t so hard at all and you tend to look at it quite differently. There’s no way now that I would go out and buy something new unless I really, really had to and there was no other way I could make do with something else or get it used in some way, because I know how easy it is to actually not need something after all.