When people let go of their clutter, the spiritual work can deeply penetrate. – Tosha Silver, Outrageous Openness
One extremely short month tomorrow, we leave the UK.
I haven’t been writing very much because all we have been doing since my last post about stuff, is getting rid of more stuff. The amount of stuff two humans can accumulate over the course of a few years is absolutely absurd.
Stuff.
The question that has been echoing through our rooms and across our days is always the same: why did I keep this? And we know that no matter how carefully we choose, when we open the boxes at the other end, the question will probably be the same: why did we keep this?
Why do we keep anything? How does one thing – ordinary to all but us – end up on the permanent life list? How does one thing make the cut?
We have made the cut many, many times. Today, again, we ask: yes or no? Things that made the yes pile three weeks ago are greeted with a sigh of exasperation and a resounding ‘no!’
Why?
All I can think is that as we get closer and closer to the end of this life and the beginning of the next, we are shedding more and more layers of ourselves as we shed the stuff of our past. Security blankets, buffers, and the emotional baggage of our past life – so present a month ago – are seeming less and less like the new us. We can’t see how this thing – once so precious – fits into the new version of ourselves. As we pack, the new versions of ourselves are beginning to emerge.
And they don’t need this stuff.
Today we burned a whole lot of stuff. Old journals, paper copies of Unfurl, receipts, and piles and piles and piles of my notes and writing went up in smoke. The last thing that went on the fire was a package of Taos Sage. Putting it close to the edge so that it would smoke instead of burn, we smudged ourselves in the clouds of smoke, releasing everything we didn’t want to take with us.
I know that things will get messier and more complicated and more wrenching and more challenging before they get better. I know that it will get harder and easier to say goodbye to the items that have made up our lives. But I also know that no matter what, a month from now, we will get on a plane and begin the next chapter of our lives. No matter what, two weeks later, we will land in Costa Rica. And I know that no matter what, we will have chosen, consciously, every single thing that is coming with us.
And that feels really good.
xo
