Today is a day of necessity. It turns out I’m a little bit of a collector of stuff. As I said yesterday I appear to have acquired more stuff this year. The famous George Carlin joke is pretty apt here as since I’ve had a place of my own it has just meant I now have more space for more stuff. This necessity then involves effort and a new type of discipline. What makes today necessary and disciplined is that it’s the day I pack up my stuff and clean the flat. Packing also appears to mean throwing out. I’m not very good at throwing out.
Many years ago now when I was travelling around Australia I had an old Toyota Corolla 1986. I loved her and we shared twenty thousand miles together. I cried a little when I gave her away, my ex girlfriend who I gave it to thought it was over her, I never had the heart to tell her the truth. It was the same story then as now, I had upgraded from a rucksack and was able to use the excess space for more stuff. When I finally left the country after fourteen months I had the unenviable task of emptying and ‘cleaning’ my car. My friends managed to get some really random and cool things I had sniffed out and acquired over the time but I managed to hold on to a few things of importance. One thing I like to mention, and use as an example of why being a hoarder is a valuable trait, were about three or four bungee cords I had picked up at some point but never used and which had lived in the boot of my car the majority of the trip. As I packed everything I could into a rucksack I managed to find space for these bungee cords. It wasn’t as I said because they were a daily necessity in my life but I just knew they would be important one day. Two years later I found myself cycling from Amsterdam to Berlin with a pile of ‘useful’ stuff attached to the back of my bike. How did I attach them I hear you ask, those very bungee cords of course. They came in handy, I knew they always would. And that is the secret of the hoarder.
It is simply the ability to look at something and recognise it’s potential value at a later date. We hardly need much use for things in the moment unless we’re doing something specific but we don’t know what the future holds either. If you can see the potential value in something why would you turn it down or not pick it up. I call it a form of foresight, or maybe it is just straight up foresight.
Today though I need to be strict with myself. It’s Australia all over again but this time I don’t simply have a bag to restrict my worst tendencies, I have the knowledge there’s space in my long suffering parents attic. While in Australia I had to contend with the difficult decision of giving away what was unquestionably the best oilskin sleeping bag I had ever used, especially difficult as I had found it in a black bin bag in the middle of the road. While others drove around I stopped for a look. Now I’m left with decisions at the level of whether I should bother keeping the three black marker pens I’ve never used but might, although probably won’t, especially as I already have a few somewhere in the attic from a previous occasion. I should donate them to someone. I admire minimalists. I think they see the world in a different way through very different eyes. I wonder what they do when they need a set of bungee cords. Surely they have a secret box of stuff somewhere. Like a perversion they keep to themselves.
Observations and Misunderstandings 