Travel Diary
How To Unravel
Lessons From A Life Abroad — The Stuff You Own, Owns You
I sat next to her at dinner tucked in the warm covered patio of a favorite seaside restaurant. She passed me a water jug and I told her I wish I’d gotten rid of everything in my storage unit. It’s jammed floor to ceiling with things I worked decades for. Designer furniture, clothing, art, stuff I wanted to throw away but ran out of time to sell. She looks over at me and laughs, “I want to change things but how do you unravel it all?”
Chuck Palahniuk wasn’t joking when he said, “The things you own end up owning you.” It’s infinitely harder to get rid of things than it is to acquire them — that applies to furniture, clothing and extra pounds. Storage isn’t cheap and you leave your goods to the gods of rats and roaches and mold and fire and tweakers with bolt cutters. Moving is a nightmare — paying for the luxury for people paid by the hour to damage your home and goods is a painful process on every level (just ask my poor wood floor).
Getting rid of my car was the easy part. After most of a year not driving it, I drove it leisurely along the Oregon coast from the lake house outside of Coos Bay, down the 101, through some of the most beautiful coastal forests I’ve ever seen. Rocks jutted out of rolling waves, studded with seagulls and giant cedars, birds of prey circled and swooped over head and the sun beat back a heavy morning fog. I drove through winding redwoods, my white Audi zipping through ancient trees, past little towns, leaving goats and elk and deer and truckers in its wake. One last hurrah and I handed her back to the dealer who was equal measures confused and impressed that I was legitimately giving him my car and unloading two suitcases to head to the airport — a fleeting moment of transition between normal life and nomadic.
If you’ve gone through cleaning out a loved one’s house posthumously then you know how much stuff a human can acquire. Similarly going through a divorce — the idea of what’s ‘mine’ versus what’s ‘yours’, it all feels like kindling for the fire after the pain of separation. It’s a weighty burden — all this stuff. It holds us here. It keeps us where we aren’t happy. We would but we can’t. We pay for it, for the delivery, the cleaning, the storage, the maintenance, the lost opportunity cost of whatever else we could’ve done with that money, space or time. We then have to dispose of it or sell it or store it. More money, more time, more work. I would, but I can’t.
This woman’s life has been unraveling for years despite trying to keep her stuff. Not in the neat way, unspooling in gentle spirals from skein to floor. Her life is unraveling in the way a hundred bodies are slammed through glass and metal as a train comes off through tracks at high speed in the middle of the night. Blood and bones and glass and metal paneling, tray tables and cocktail glasses, cell phones with text messages, a hand held by someone other than your spouse. She’s worried about her sofa and her shoes and what to do with the cars. She twists her wedding band on her suntanned hand and I think, and she thinks, and we all think, my god I wish I didn’t have all this fucking stuff.
I’ll tell you what I told her, and later what I told her husband in a separate but similar conversation. If you didn’t have these things would you buy them today, knowing the true and full cost? There’s a deeper question — would you choose them today? Your person? Your friends? Your workplace? Your career? The city you live in? The salary you make? The beliefs you have? Knowing the full cost paid and what has been lost — would you choose this today? If not, you may be at the crux of reconsidering.
Having things isn’t cause for keeping them — that includes religions and marriages and cars and behavioral patterns. If the idea of unraveling is daunting, that in itself is an orange flag. I have to go back at some point and sort through the overpriced hellscape that is my storage unit. I’m kicking that can down the road $158.88 at a time. But I know now that the life I want is one that I don’t have to unravel from. As I move forward I am choosing with different intentions. Do I need this? Do I want this? What does this cost me? What am I giving up to have or do or be this? Is it worth it? And I keep asking myself if I’d choose this again today, today and the next today.
Hey You! Yes, YOU!
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