My best friend Noel who'd been batching all his life and did all his own own washing, cooking, and mending, kept nothing more than what he called his "housewife" which consisted of his own mattress, sheets, pillows, blankets, cutlery, crockery, kitchen utensils and an old teapot.
A small shack he had bought on the edge of Caboolture came with a kitchen table and three upright wooden chairs. On my visits there I found those chairs a little uncomfortable and so I picked up two old armchairs from a second-hand shop at nearby Beachmere. Did he take them along when he moved to Mount Perry a few years later? No, he didn't! While Noel's belongings didn't all fit into one suitcase (although they once did when he had come back to Australia after a lifetime in New Guinea), they easily fitted on the backseat of his battered old car.
With such an excellent role model and after two decades of living out of a suitcase myself, what possessed me to become such a compulsive hoarder of "stuff", but mainly books and DVDs? Why, I even have a copy of the book "Freedom from Clutter" --- although I have yet to read it!
Instead, I've just read - again! - one of my other hoarded books, Robert Dean Frisbie's "Island of Desire". It is a spell-binding island adventure-cum -romance novel based on his own real life adventures. The second half of the book describes the frightening experience of living through a hurricane on Suwarrov Atoll during which he lost all his belongings. Instead of bemoaning his loss, he comforts himself with these words:
"I have been wondering if the loss of my personal property is not a blessing. I am beginning to feel a kind of angry pleasure because these household gods are gone. The hurricane has been Nature's way of cleaning the old deadwood from Suvarrow, and incidentally I have profited by losing my own deadwood. I had chests full of instruments, tools, manuscripts, keepsakes, rags and tags, books that would never be read again but were kept as sentimental reminders of the past — deadwood that had burdened me for years but that I had never had the fortitude to throw away. I carried on my back a burden of possessions, never realizing that the effort to carry them was out of proportion to the pleasure they could give me. Now I am grateful that they are gone. Let these reminders of the past be forgotten; let them molder with the wreckage of Suvarrow. Let the past be forgotten lest it fasten its cumbrous fingers on the future." [click here]
I, too, have chests full of keepsakes, rags and tags, reminders of the past, and shelves full of books that I will never read again. I, too, carry on my back a burden of possessions, never realising that the effort to carry them is out of proportion to the pleasure they could give me.
When will I find the fortitude to throw off the burden of my possessions?
