stuff, and the space it occupies.

I always underestimate how much time and effort is required when moving. Looking around my apartment last week, I thought I'd have no problem packing everything up, finding a place for it. Now, several days into my packing week, I'm feeling a bit panicked by the amount of stuff strewn about the place.

Sometimes I think about what it's like to live in countries where personal space is more limited. For example, when I taught in China, the apartment allocated to me for the year was a similar amount of space as my current apartment. I lived there alone. But an apartment one floor below, with the same layout, housed a family of four (mother, father, daughter, grandmother), and it wasn't unusual. What was unusual was one lone wai guo ren occupying that apartment. When I left there, I had loads of stuff, even though I'd started with near nothing. Similar experience leaving Thailand, where, during the last week before going back to MN, I repeatedly sorted thru clothing, trinkets, memorabilia, discarding items along the way, so I wouldn't be turned away at the airport for having overweighted luggage.

Why do I surround myself with so much stuff? How have I accumulated so much? The thing about stuff is that it's accumulated so mindlessly, because room can always be found for something we really want. And it's hard to leave things empty. But when I moved into this apartment, it was empty, and I liked it. In the first month I was here, I loved sitting in my one chair, looking out the window, drinking coffee. I loved sitting in the chair because it was the only place to sit, besides the air mattress I slept on. I loved it because it was unique. Over time, another chair came, and a sofa, so that I never sat on the chair anymore, but instead used it merely to hold clothes or papers to be sorted. Other things came too, like boxes from my parents' basements and attics, clothing, trinkets, memorabilia. The unclutteredness of that first month was at the expense of space in other people's homes. My stuff was cluttering their space, instead of my own.

And of course, the cluttering of a home is such a gradual process that it never becomes apparent until the stuff needs to be physically moved from one space to another. I've done a great deal of de-cluttering this week. Pared down my book collection to, at most, a quarter of its original proportions (if you've ever seen my bookshelves, you know this is a feat!), sorted through clothes, household items, old files and papers, made several trips to the local goodwill.

I do have a point in all this, something about how clutter is a byproduct of indecision. And I might be able to get around to that point if I keep writing for a while longer. But now I have to go do something, pack something, sort something. Any little step that makes me feel I'm getting even slightly closer to my goal of removing all trace of myself from this apartment.

5 more days.