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Spirituality
How to Throw Things Away
A Personal Perspective: Clearing out the superfluous is a spiritual practice.
Posted March 30, 2022 Reviewed by Vanessa Lancaster
I may not qualify yet for a hoarding reality show, but I do have hundreds of files and boxes full of papers, letters, and memorabilia I never look at. What would happen if it was all gone? Would I be suffused with sorrow? Would my life appreciably change? Would I feel greater liberation than regret, lighter and unburdened overall?
Moving, like dying, forces us to confront the extraneous. File cabinets and drawers stuffed to the brim, boxes piled high in the backs of closets – why keep letters and cards that we never re-read? One card with my grandmother’s handwriting should be enough. Notes of gratitude from former students mean a lot, but must I retain these indefinitely? Maybe I no longer need these affirmations of the profession to which I have been so devoted.
An unnerving yet productive tactic is to envision someone dealing with the piles of papers if you suddenly weren’t here. You instantly realize that most of your accumulation will one day be dumped into a recycling bin. The things you are saving as reminders of your past are useless to others. Sure, you may value what you keep, but worth is arbitrary, personal, and essentially all in your head.
In a real sense, to throw things away is to prepare to die. This is not a gloomy declaration but rather an enlivening recognition of the freedom that ensues when we take ourselves less seriously. It’s the same as looking at a sky full of stars and feeling the relief of insignificance. Awareness of the brevity of our time on earth and the impermanence of both our attachments and our travails can become a powerful basis for uncluttering things and emotions alike.
A few years ago, dear friends were called home from work to an inferno. They watched as their house burned to the ground, despite the efforts of several fire crews. Everything material, cherished things, and accumulations were reduced to ashes – clothes, photo albums, furniture, paintings, books, boxes of old letters, the piano, mementos of travel.
By nightfall, what they had left were the clothes they had worn that day and the photos they had kept at their workplaces. At first, they felt utterly bereft, but once they emerged from the initial shock and grief, they were sustained by ample love from family and friends. Their lives were intact, and this is what really mattered. It is astonishing to discover how little weight our possessions carry in this calculus of true necessity.
These days I am deliberate about focusing on my eventual demise, summoning the image of my son or daughter stuck with cleaning out my closets. This way, I’m better able to challenge my flimsy reasons for hanging on to things, those thin rationalizations that don’t stand up to honest reckoning.
My inner dialogue brooks no excuses: “This travel file could be useful someday – where we stayed, the sites we visited.” Everything in here is outdated and can be found up to date on the internet. You’re not likely to go back there, anyway. Into the recycling bin, it goes, along with similar files that have been needlessly taking up space.
To test head-on what I have articulated here, I just got rid of a grocery bag’s worth of papers pulled at random from a box. Out went the alumni magazines, followed by newspaper clippings I’d meant to send to friends before the internet age, networking contacts, to-do lists that hadn’t been fulfilled, handouts from lectures I’d attended and forgotten, and another travel file that had somehow escaped the earlier purging.
It went faster due to writing this post. I found the hour satisfying and well spent, yet I have to confess that I set aside some cards and letters from friends. They went into another box to be grappled with some other time.
Clearly, I am only midway toward practicing what I am preaching. I have made progress, but I still have those letters from former students. I also retained the complete correspondence from my friends known since college, originating back when letter-writing was a key form of communication. I offered to send one especially prolific friend a few boxes of her decades-old letters, assuring her that they would serve as a kind of diary of her youth. She strenuously refused to take those boxes off my hands. I still have them.
All of this is to say that clearing out the superfluous is a spiritual practice. I will fill one grocery bag per week at a minimum, hopefully moving toward one per day as I am rewarded by the space I make in my home and myself. Far from mundane, the act of throwing things away helps us accept the work of relinquishment. I am getting there.
Copyright Wendy Lustbader, 2022
