If we are eighty or approaching it, we have stuff. It is the result of years of living. Some of it is important to us and some of it we have forgotten we even own. That stuff is found in the dark corners of our closets, attics, and basements, and stays there out of inertia.
A few years ago, I learned a wonderful lesson about stuff and one’s relationship to it. This tale came from one of my friends, who as a young woman had escaped from Czechoslovakia (as it was called then) in front of the advancing armies of Hitler. She met her future husband on the road and married him in Portugal, taking a boat for the United States which would be their new home. Her family home, pocessions – everything they owned --- was lost in the maelstrom of World War II.
Years later, she was living in France, and was taken by an excited friend to view the antique desk she had just bought in a Paris flea market. While admiring the purchase my friend surreptitiously slipped her hand under the desk front and traced some initials, initials she had put there years before. As she thought, it was a piece of furniture from her grandmother’s elegant home in the countryside of her native land. As a very little girl, she had carved her initials on the underside of the desk, something her strict grandmother would have been horrified to learn.
Now, she was confronted with this unexpected relic from a past not only gone, but irradicated. We who were listening to the tale immediately asked if she had told her friend of the desk’s history. “No,” she replied. “It would have taken away her pleasure in her new piece of furniture and would not have brought back my past. I was just happy it had found a new home where it would be treasured.”
May we let go of our stuff as graciously as this, and if this desk could survive the whirlwind of war perhaps our stuff will find an unexpected happy home as well.