Memories, Stuff, and Molecules

Well, the apartment organization project continues.

I'm almost done, at least relative to the gigantic mess I started out with. I did not even shower today until around 4 PM because I'd spent the morning and afternoon mostly sitting on the living room floor trying to find storage and categories for the most difficult-to-sort of all my stuff.

Things like books and clothes are easy; we have bookshelves and closets for those sorts of items.

But what does one do with a pile consisting of (for example) several intact play-doh canisters, a weird light-up smiley face thing on the end of a stick that spins when you press a button on the side, an empty plastic eyeglass case with magnetic closure, innumerable rubber bracelets, a handmade glass 6-sided die, several USB adapters, a plastic "ray gun" that shoots small foam discs, a miniature metal lunchbox thing with "Smarties" printed on the side, a nifty but ill-fitting Lego watch, two pairs of prism-lens glasses (the kind with cardboard frames), a tiny plastic frog keychain, glow in the dark plastic beads, and multiple SD memory cards (functional but too small to be of much use these days)?

I had several piles of precisely that sort of stuff to sort through today.

And I sorted them -- mostly.

I weeded out lots of random weird bits of paper from all that stuff too -- mainly notes to myself written over the past three years or so, directions to places I only went once, greeting cards, etc.

What struck me by late afternoon was just how emotional this sort of thing is for me. I thought I was merely tired at first, when I found myself starting to move very slowly and stare into space a lot, but then I realized that I felt at once weirdly light and oddly weighted.

You see, every piece of paper, string, plastic, etc., is a pointer to a plethora of memories -- which means that going through the piles I went through today led to a rapid-fire review of several years of my life, in full epic color detail in my mind's eye.

Not only that, but seeing as I am quite space-limited in my present apartment, I had the task of taking each pointer-to-a-memory and judging it.

I had to take each thing, and the memory it called up, and determine how much I valued that thing, what it meant to keep it, whether I could or should throw it away, whether I might want to give it away, etc.

I know I won't necessarily forget everything associated with the stuff I did end up discarding, but nevertheless, something in me felt like it was...apologizing every time I found something that I determined didn't fit in my life anymore (no matter how small).

This might all come across as horribly materialistic, but really it's not that -- I can live very comfortably with very little, in fact. It's just that I guess I've gotten to an age now where stuff has accumulated, and it's weird to be at a point where some of it has to go.

When I was younger, it seemed like my family tended to have the exact required amount of everything important and no more, and very little was ever thrown away. My dad especially raised me to note the differences between "expensive" and "well made", and to actually repair things when they broke rather than just go off and buy something new.

Mind you we didn't have literal garbage around everywhere (and I don't now) -- I am perfectly capable of throwing away a moldy orange peel, milk carton, or shredded bag of junk mail. Apparently my brain is at least somewhat selective when it comes to that sort of thing.

But nonetheless, there is something about the culture I've grown up in the midst of that seems alien to me, and was not the way things worked in my actual household. I was shocked when I got older to find out that it was considered normal and acceptable to get rid of something functional just because it had gone out of fashion.

So, I guess I am what you might call a "pack rat". It's genetic and environmental for me; I couldn't really not be one, given my dad's very similar tendencies in this regard.

These tendencies have served me very well in some respects; so long as I'm employed, I find saving money practically effortless because it so infrequently occurs to me to "go buy a new X".

I've also always tended to have interesting materials around to build things, make art, and do other projects with. (If not for all those old school binders I kept, I'd not have had the nice clear plastic I used for ID windows in my first handmade duct-tape wallets!)

And I am also happy to have things on hand that someone else might need or want -- being able to give something away is probably the best "fate" I can imagine for an object with memories attached to it but which I cannot physically keep.

I like the idea of that object being able to potentially collect more memories, and associations for someone else; somehow that makes me feel as if the item is being "done justice", if that makes any sense.

Furthermore, I have gotten quite concerned with sustainability issues as of late. Humans really do throw away a lot that could probably be very easily repurposed, repaired, or cleaned up and re-used -- and in the sanitized suburbs of the United States, I think there's a tendency for people to forget that when you throw something away (presuming it isn't recycled right away), it doesn't just blink out of existence - it just goes somewhere else where you can't see it, and becomes (in the case of landfills) someone else's problem.

So in addition to just naturally tending toward keeping stuff, I feel like I've got a bit of an impetus to avoid "egregious waste" to whatever extent possible -- and that means sorting stuff very carefully, not just glancing over it and chucking whatever seems to be creating the most physical inconvenience for me. (I realize that having this amount of choice over what happens to "my" stuff is itself a privilege, as someone on their way to becoming homeless doesn't really have the luxury of sorting his or her belongings into recycle-or-dump, and I don't take that for granted either.)

Someday I know that all these little things, so full of memories and links to events and feelings and impressions of a particular time, will disintegrate (or be ground up in some piece of junkyard or recycling equipment). I have a tendency, it is true, to hang onto particular forms for as long as I can -- to celebrate those forms even if only silently to myself -- but at the same time, the thought of each form becoming part of something else someday, or reverting back into constituent parts or molecules, is never far from my mind. There are very very few materials that can physically last in any given form for all that long as far as the timescale of the universe is concerned.

I am okay with this both because I have to be, and because on some level I know that the exploration of form and pattern by reality as time unfolds is part and parcel of the beauty of reality. But at the very least, within the timescale I actually inhabit, I will never find the process of sorting the forms I encounter (no matter how ephemeral) trivial, least of all when some are kept and some are passed along.