The detritus of living - an existential musing

Human lives are not particularly like trees, certainly not like the trees that are discarding their clutter of old and dying leaves right now, in readiness for spring rebirthing. Lives are not so easily renewed. We accumulate clutter and part with it reluctantly. It is our lichen and our moss. It is also our root that holds us in one place. We are bound to home and family, not by affection nor bonds of love, but by the impossibility of removing the accumulations of a lifetime from one place to another.

This morning, as I bestir myself to clear out the bottom drawer of my life, I ask myself do I really need this piece of pink embroidery that I stitched in 1953? Will its antiquity oblige you, Fairypoo, in your turn, to turn it into a treasured heirloom, along with your grandmother’s darned fishing socks and your great aunt May’s silverware?

Do not suppose that cluttering a genetic survival trait. If your father really owns less clutter than me, shouldn’t you have at least two siblings who accumulate less than you? Genetics have nothing to do with it. Check the garage to see how much junk he really owns. As for you, Fairypoo, if your bedroom is relatively uncluttered just now, that is because you carried off your clutter to your once sparsely furnished apartment on the east coast so that it could be illuminated daily, at dawn, by the rising of the sun over the Irish sea. Quality clutter, clutter that has seen better days when it basked each evening, in the intervals between storms and rain, in the golden light of Atlantic sunsets.

Trees shed their clutter as I write. I could do the same. Discard my possessions. Dump everything. Except, of course, my books and my drawers of linens that aren’t really clutter at all and maybe that bit of pink embroidery and Nan’s darned socks.

What then? Would I wander, dispossessed and bewildered, like a victim of earthquake or war or a decorating make-over? Can I really hope be born anew, like trees in spring, with space freed up for the accumulationg of a whole new set of clutter?

Hmmmm..........