Trust Me…..your kids don’t want your stuff.
Most people move through life accumulating more and more stuff. Over the years the house gets bigger, fuller and the storage solutions more and more refined to keep the stuff organised and accessible….with the end goal of fitting in more stuff.
Hell, I get it, I’ve just spent 3 hours online looking for packing cubes, cord organisers and the perfect tote bag to become my nomad office….and I now own less stuff that any other person I know!
Then, at the end of your life, someone else gets to deal with that stuff. They get to sort through it and decide what means something to them, what has value and what doesn’t. They decide how to disperse the stuff, who gets what, what to sell, what to donate, what to throw in the rubbish.
What’s been an eye opener, and at times confronting for me to learn, is that my kids don’t want my stuff. Just because it means something to me, just because I’ve attached memories and feelings to that item, doesn’t mean that my kids have. No one wants that crystal dressing table set that Nanna used to own and you’ve imagined your granddaughter using.
I’ve downsized twice in the last three months and the only things the kids were interested in taking was 2 rugs, some Tupperware pantry containers and my knife set (under sufferance) — they had the opportunity to ask for anything I owned. The only barrier being transportation, as 3 of them live 2000km away. Because I didn’t wait til I died to do this I’ve had to confront the fact that my kids don’t want my stuff! Normally, you aren’t around to see what happens to it.
So what are we collecting so much stuff for? Why do we fill our homes and our lives with stuff? Why do we spend days. weeks, years collecting, displaying, organising, labelling, tidying, moving and caring for our stuff. Then more hours, days and weeks, housing, cleaning, insuring, repairing, maintaining our stuff. What meaning do we make of having all this stuff? What needs does it fill?
Shedding almost everything you own is a great way to get up close to the meaning we assign to the stuff we own. How we make our stuff about our identity, our emotional connection to ourselves and others, to our feelings of safety and security, and our feelings of worthiness and how the purchasing and caring for all that stuff becomes a way that we numb other feelings.
The first time i lost everything I owned, this time I chose to shed everything i own. I’m learning new things about myself this time :-)
