My mom and dad, when they were first married, lived in a trailer home, and the place of course was small. Small enough that even though they were newlyweds, without much stuff, the living space quickly became cramped. So the two of them made up a rule: that whenever a new object came into the house, something already there of about equal size would have to come out first.
I'm not really sure how strictly my folks kept the policy, or for how long; though my guess is that, given my mother's determination in practical matters, it probably really was kept strictly at least for a time. I also think it's safe to say that, at least on some occasions, following through with the policy must been pretty painful. How to weigh one item against the next? How to say whether a new pair of shoes was more important than a couple of good books? Or a foot stool more useful than an end table? Or a Monopoly game more fun than a Mah Jong set?
And yet the point of the rule was to keep themselves sane. Without it there would have been that ever-oppressive sense of clutter, especially for my mother who stayed at home much of the day. There would have been accidents: tripping over things, running bang into things with your shins. There would have been arguments between the newlyweds about just how messy it was and who ought to clean up. So they did this work of weeding their possessions before they brought in anything new. Or at least that's how I like to imagine it. Out on the prairie outskirts of a town called Cosmos. My mom and dad bravely banishing the demon of clutter.
I think of Mom and Dad's rule fairly often. I thought of it just this morning in fact, when I went to the basement to bring up a new batch of music CD's. Yes we Sunnysiders still listen to actual recordings that can be held in the hand. It's direct. It's easy. It's the whole album. But it's also, well, much more prone to cause clutter than streaming is. And so, in order to prevent clutter, we keep most of our recordings downstairs, and what we listen to, we listen to in sets. Every couple of weeks I venture down to pull up a new set that we might enjoy listening to.
It's a fun thing to do--playing DJ for the next couple of weeks. Trying to anticipate what we might enjoy. Fitting the season of the year to the music. Fitting the music to whatever else we might be taking in as well. For instance just last month I read Styron's Sophie's Choice, which contains many references to music. I made it a project to listen to at least several of the works cited, and I found it quite meaningful.
So the choosing out and the bringing up is the fun part. But there's a hard part to the task as well: it's to go to the cupboard where the current CD's are shelved, take them (with a little sigh) down from that shelf, bring them back downstairs and THEN and only then get down to choosing out the new ones. It's an essential step of course, to bring the current set down. Without following through on it, in no time at all the whole collection would migrate up to the living space. Guaranteed.
You wouldn't think the act of bringing down the CD's should be so hard, but it is, or can be. In the first place, there are all those CD's you brought up a week or two ago, but didn't actually listen too. These CD's make you feel guilty! After all, like an inconsiderate impresario, you dangled the promise of performance in front of them, but then never followed through, and now they have to return to the frustrations of obscurity. Or maybe too, for me it's a bit like the feeling you get when you're traveling, and you pass through a town where some old friends of yours live, but you don't stop. You had planned to, but now you can't. Or just don't.
Then too, among the CD's due for return, there's always a certain number that you've enjoyed and don't want to put away, at least not just yet. Of course there's no law that says these have to be returned just now, but then too, not all of them can stay! And do you really want to be cogitating and waffling about which ones stay and which ones go? I myself have found the best strategy is to return them all--ruthlessly. "There'll be other opportunities later," I say to myself. And so far there have been.
Here's the moral, or as preachers used to say, the application: We human beings display instincts for both novelty and continuity, and both instincts have their useful places in our lives. But these instincts also, often enough, conflict with one another. And part of living wisely and simply has to do with learning to allow the conflict between the old and the new to play out with some regularity, and then take care of it, re-balancing the equation. It's really best not to put that task of rebalancing off; otherwise, our lives can get pretty seriously cluttered up and complicated.
All this is just as true in the dimension of time, as it is in the dimension of space. Let's remember this! Schedules can get as cluttered as any room. So before we take up some new task, however novel and fun, or useful to the world, or genuinely altruistic, we ought to consider (first!) the need to make the space for it--by giving something that's already in the schedule up. There's only so much time in a day, and we want to use that (limited) gift of time intelligently, meaningfully, joyfully; nor do we want to suffer mission creep, which has such a way of overwhelming us with responsibility and stress. After all, it doesn't really matter if the tasks we do, in themselves, are dear to our hearts, if in sum they only make us miserable!
I offer this up as a meditation for the New Year. As something to think about as we all move forward across that arbitrary yet meaningful border in time. It's a good time to think about how to do better. How to impose some sanity in our lives. How to love what we do. How to enjoy ourselves. How to nurture our relationships. How to taste some sweet aspect of the elemental even within this brew of complexity that's modern life.
Happy New Year to all my readers! I enjoy writing for you! Your visits to this space are such an honor.
HB
Until Saturday the 4th!
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