Sure, I believe in simple living, but actually living simply is another thing.

At our last week’s Men’s Breakfast, Jeff Keuss asked they guys to share about their relationship to ‘stuff.’  Turns out, just about everybody reported having problems dealing with their stuff.  At least I’m not alone.

As my breakfast brothers shared, I realized we all had different reasons for our conflicted relationship with things.  Two weeks ago, Kate and I bought a house.  To be sure, it has been exciting.  Our move brought us back to Seattle, 5 minutes from the church, closer to Kate’s work, and into a home of our very own.  We’ve felt exceedingly grateful, especially for the hard work of my folks who made it possible to begin with.  But not everything has been exciting.  This  move has slammed me kind of hard, and it’s forced me to reflect upon my attachment to my stuff.

Moving is not foreign to me.  In my 40 years, I’ve lived in at least 23 different homes, and in none for more than 5 years.  I marvel at the deep connections so many  have to a geographic place in their lives.  It makes me feel like a nomad.  For me, home was simply where my family was.

While my family was never attached to a single house, we were extraordinarily connected to our things.  My folks were thrifty.  They bought only what felt necessary.  For things that were free (or at a garage sale) there was no threshold of necessity to meet.  Rather it was whether we could see a possible use for the object under consideration.  To be fair, we did put most of those things to use, but the sheer volume of what we saved became unwieldy in the extreme.  I hope the reader will indulge my blaming my folks for at least some of my ‘inherited’ tendency to hang onto too much.

Last year, my sisters and I spent several months dealing with the things my parents had accumulated.  Our days sorting were filled with a thousand good-bye’s.  Their things seemed to hold memories of them and the time we’d shared.  Some things held the promise of a story now held only by one of their friends or relatives.  Some things were so precious that my sisters and I dreaded having to decide who would keep it.  Other things were full of memories, but just weren’t the kind of thing any of us would want to keep.  And all of it was complicated by the limited space we each had, individually, in which to absorb more things, no matter how much those things helped us feel close to our dear departed.

Since Kate and I had moved, just a couple of months before my parents’ accident, into a house large enough to hold the things we’d been keeping in storage, I’d been able to sort and get rid of many boxes of things.  It felt great.

But now we’ve moved into a much smaller house, and I need to get rid of much more.

That’s what’s slamming me hard.  Every box I sort through is filled with so many memories.  Every space that became a home for me, that I lose, means saying another good-bye.  Every good-bye a reminder of the most painful good-byes I’ve faced in my life.

Somehow I’ve come to see some of these things as parts of me.  I guess that’s it.  That’s my confession.  It sounds so ridiculous.

Getting rid of things means change.  Will my memories survive the change?  Will who-I-am survive?  Just acknowledging these fears makes me wonder at the person I’ve become.  It is humbling to see how I’ve changed.

There is a sense in which the hand that clings ceaselessly ceases to be a hand.  It is no longer able to move or handle anything else.  It has chosen its work and it remains loyal to that one thing it does.  If my inability to let go of things keeps me and Kate from using our new home to make new memories, I will be sacrificing the new for the old.  I will be binding her hands too.

The ancient philosopher Lao Tzu writes, Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub; It is the center hole that makes it useful. Shape clay into a vessel; It is the space within that makes it useful. Cut doors and windows for a room; It is the holes which make it useful. Therefore profit comes from what is there; Usefulness from what is not there.

Across the street from our new house is the dumpiest house in the neighborhood.   Paint peals from the siding.  Two rusty-old vehicles sit in the unmown yard.

Two mornings ago I saw an ambulance pull up to the house.  Soon a few other cars pulled up, and my neighbor was taken away.  I walked over to introduce myself and inquire after the neighbor I’d not yet met.  He’d called 911 on the verge of collapse.  They didn’t know if it was his emphysema or his congestive heart failure.  I gave them my phone number and left for work.

When I got home, I saw more vehicles across the street.  People were going through the abandoned vehicles.  Some were tidying the yard.  When I went over, I feared the worst.

“Come on in!  Frank is back, doing well, and he’ll want to meet his new neighbor.”

I could never recount here the whole range of issues Frank and I discussed, but what a conversation it was!  Frank is receiving hospice care and doesn’t expect to live long.  He’s had two wives, three daughters, and four grand-kids.  For 30 years he was a contractor in Seattle, operating out of the van still parked in front of his house.  He tells me, “Ken, I’ve had a good and long life.  My life is my treasure and curiosity has been my food!”  The walls which surround him are covered in photos of that life, with family and friends and the experiences which are his treasure.

So Frank and I may still have our attachments, and I may have more time left to unburden myself of them, but I do agree with Frank and Jesus’ sermon on the mount, …store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Mt. 6.20-21)

Let the good work of unpacking and unloading continue!