Liberation in Loss: The Gift of Non- Attachment
Sixteen Years ago I unwittingly started on the journey of non-attachment. Not by choice and certainly not as some type of spiritual quest.
Sixteen years ago we lost everything in a fire. Every possession that I held any emotional attachment to, from the baby photos to the engagement ring and my wedding dress. It included all the big emotionally charged items that it would have been almost impossible for me to give away, throw away, and that no one else would want because they only meant something to me.
That loss forced me to do some serious identity work. I had never thought of myself as a materialistic person, but what I hadn’t realised was how we wrap our identity up in the stuff we own, how we use that stuff to tell the world who we think we are, and how we want the world to see us. It’s largely unconscious, but everything you choose to buy or hold onto means something to you. A memory, a milestone, a moment in time you want to keep forever. They all say something about who you are and what you make important in your life, and on an unconscious level, who you want to project yourself as, into the world. It’s a type of unconscious virtue signalling. These are my values. This is my identity. This is important to me. This is who I am.
When you lose all those things, all in one fell sweep, the grief is profound. None of the ‘stuff’ is valuable in itself. A wedding dress that’s twenty years old and never likely to be worn again is worthless from a monetary perspective, but it holds all the hopes and dreams of a twenty year old who is convinced that she is marrying the perfect man, and that one day her daughter may just want to wear that dress too, and that maybe her granddaughter will be amazed at it’s beauty and that Nanna has had it tucked away for 50 years, just waiting for her.
Yes, it’s the story we tell ourselves, the death of the story and the imagery we have created around why we held onto that twenty year old wedding dress, rather than the dress itself. Our memories are not held in a wedding dress, or a fridge magnet, but the stories we tell ourselves certainly are.
Over the 16 years following that loss there were more catalysts for me to live this extreme clutter free life I’m living now; multiple life events, divorce, moving house, children leaving home, and downsizing, have all had me refining and shedding, refining and shedding, until I’ve reached the point where I am at today. A digital nomad with one suitcase and one backpack. No, I don’t have a storage unit awaiting my return. There’s one suitcase, one box and some podcasting gear at my daughter’s house and a box containing my winter boots and a few personal items at a girlfriends house. That’s the sum total of my possessions.
Over the last few years before selling the last of my possessions I experienced a creeping sensation of being burdened and not having the freedom I really yearned for. I felt burdened by the things I owned. I would go to the cupboard and feel annoyed at the 20 coffee cups, the Tupperware cupboard that overflowed, the gadgets, even the things I’d worked hard to collect and loved.
I felt a slave to my stuff. Not only did I have to work to buy the original ‘stuff,’ but then when it got too much I had bought storage stuff and labelling stuff to better organise and be able to find my stuff, then I had to pay either a mortgage or rent to store my stuff, I had to spend my free time cleaning and caring for my stuff and the house it was stored in, I had to insure my stuff in case there was a fire or theft, I had to ensure the house wasn’t left for long periods so I had to organise someone to care for my stuff in my absence, then I had to maintain, repair and update my stuff as it became obsolete, outdated or didn’t work. When you start to think about it, how much of my time was about earning, keeping and caring for the stuff?
It wasn’t like I owned a lot, especially in comparison to what we had owned before the fire…..but I still felt like I was a slave and my freedom was being severely impacted by owning the ‘stuff,’ and that no longer brought me joy.
It’s a convoluted journey, but it brings me to the current day where I’m travelling the world with one small carryon bag and one small backpack and I’m seriously irritated by anything unnecessary or if I have to carry an extra shopping bag with gifts etc until I can get them posted!
I honestly look back on that fire as a gift, perhaps one of the greatest gifts of my life. Not only for the lessons about myself it delivered in the moments and years after, or even how it set me up for the lessons I’m still learning today, nor for the resilience and clutter free life, but for the actual loss of all the things I was most attached to, that I’d have found almost impossible to let go of if I’d had to choose it. It has forced me to reckon with myself, my identity, my relationship to stuff, and my knowledge that I am Enough. Gifts I simply don’t think I could have learnt any other way.
I doubt I’d be travelling the world now with just one suitcase and a backpack without that fire.
A lifetime worth of stuff is just too much for me to carry.
