Lately, there is a certain thought that flashes through my mind: “I’ll be ready to die when the time comes.” It always seems to come out of nowhere, but it doesn’t really. A keen sense of my own mortality first drew me to Buddhism as a teenager—and now that most of my close friends and I have moved past 70, it’s not really surprising to discover that, even subliminally, my mind is working to be ready.
What does surprise me, however, is how often my next thought is, “But I have too many things to die!” And though no one else is there to witness, each time I feel a certain embarrassment that my mind leaps so quickly from death to things. Yet even here I know I’m in good company, and that—just as pregnant women often feel a strong urge toward nesting—it’s common later in life to feel a strong urge toward winnowing.
Then again, sometimes I wonder: Is it really an urge from within, or is it rather an intense sense of pressure, bearing down from the wider culture? Whatever the case, I can see that many of my friends are feeling compelled to embrace a starkly minimalist aesthetic. Some of them have quite explicitly taken up the practice of “Swedish Death Cleaning,” methodically sorting through their mountains of belongings so as to spare their offspring the immense labor that their own parents left to them.
As for me, I certainly don’t wish for anyone I love to feel encumbered after I’m gone. But when I think “I have too many things to die,” I’m not thinking so much of my offspring but of my things. This is the source of my embarrassment—and it’s compounded by the feeling that, as a good Zen student, I should be able to let go of things with grace and ease. The truth is: I feel a sense of obligation that directly opposes any drive to winnow. And it seems to emanate from the objects themselves.
Not from all of them—there are those that exert relatively little magnetic pull, and it’s mostly laziness on my part that keeps me from stuffing them into a bag and schlepping them to the thrift store. But for many of my possessions, it’s as though when I acquired them I made a promise: “I won’t let you go until I have found your next true home.” It’s this, rather than pure greed, that complicates the process of letting go. And whenever I’m able to fulfill this promise—especially if the new owner seems genuinely delighted with the offering—it’s not nearly so hard to relinquish my grip. I usually feel an intense sense of relief, along with what I’m sure must be a disproportionate sense of accomplishment.
In contrast, when I leave a belonging in some generic “Donations” bin, it feels like an act of abandonment, as if I’ve failed to find the right family for an animal that has been in my care. No doubt this is because many of my belongings were objects that I felt the need to rescue from a thrift store or yard sale in the first place, as if rescuing them from the pound. And actually, quite a few of my belongings are animal figures of one kind or another—most of them quirky, like my rubber zebra, dressed in a sailor suit, circa 1940. (When I took him up to the thrift store counter to pay for him, the woman standing at the register exclaimed, “Finally someone is taking him home!”) Or an intricately carved moose, his hind legs dressed in flannel trousers that somebody carefully sewed for him.
As a child, I had no trouble believing that when I closed my eyes at night, some of my dolls and stuffed animals would leap up from the shelves, and—just like in storybooks—they would dance about and have parties and fall in love and get jealous and have fights with one another. As I grew older, my toys grew more fixed and inert, less likely to spring into life the moment I closed my eyes. Yet deep down I’ve always known myself to be an animist, a person who believes that objects have souls. It’s the thing I get about Marie Kondo, the Japanese goddess of decluttering: the way she demonstrates holding an object in your hands for a while, gazing at it appreciatively, then thanking it for its service before you toss it in the “Give Away” bin. I’ve tried this technique, and it does help—but for many of my belongings, it’s just not quite enough to sever the bond.
Afew years ago, after a colleague lost his home and all his possessions in the wildfires that swept through our part of northern California, he told me he was fed up with the phrase “It’s just things.” And it’s true that again and again in the aftermath of the fires, people were bravely repeating to one another that what they had lost were “just things.” The implication was that things—unlike people and pets—can always be replaced. “But things aren’t just things!” my friend said.
Our conversation was interrupted before he could say more—but I felt I understood why he resisted the impulse to cushion a sense of loss by devaluing what was lost. (And actually, if you take this impulse to its extreme, doesn’t it lead to the place where people diminish the most acute forms of loss inflicted on other beings by devaluing those beings, seeing people as less than human, and animals as objects for human consumption?)
The truth is: I feel a sense of obligation that directly opposes any drive to winnow. And it seems to emanate from the objects themselves.
Later, when I thought about it, I assumed that when my friend insisted that “things aren’t just things,” he meant that many of his belongings held an emotional resonance for him, a resonance linked to memories of very specific people, places, and times in his life. In one way or another, they were souvenirs, and when I look around my own house, I can see many objects that carry an emotional charge in this way. I have only to lift my eyes to see the round ceramic head, painted in earth tones, that I bought for my father on Olvera Street in Los Angeles when I was 6. It was one of the first gifts that I ever chose for anyone, and I have no idea where I got the money. It amazes me that at this very moment it is sitting in front of my fireplace, looking utterly rooted in its spot, despite its many long journeys—having traveled from somewhere in Mexico to Los Angeles, then to northern California, New Hampshire, and three different residences in Florida before returning to me after my father died.
What could easily replace such an object? And what should I do with it now? I don’t really feel the need to possess it, but I can’t think of anyone for whom it would be as full of meaning as it is for me. And so it will continue to sit there, in front of my fireplace, and I will have to look for other things to give away….
Give-away.
Long ago I learned about the tradition of give-away ceremonies among certain Native American tribes, like the Lakota of the Great Plains. I can remember my college professor explaining to us that the purpose of these ceremonies was, in part, to test and strengthen each person’s capacity to detach from material possessions. But it was also a way of keeping a highly prized object in circulation, giving it a new life in a new context, rather than allowing it to stagnate on some shelf, rack, or hook.
In offering up a prized object, the giver could confer value upon the receiver—yet without creating a sense of obligation, as each receiver was simultaneously a giver, participating in the circle of mutual give-and-take. What strikes me now is that this ritual was a way of letting go of an object without devaluing it, without demeaning it by seeing it through the lens of “just a thing.”
Maybe I could invite a group of friends to come to my house bearing an object that was charged with associations for them, as the ceramic head is for me. Sitting in a circle around the objects, we could take turns choosing which one to take back to our own house, with the understanding that it would be easier to let go of an object to which we had no previous connection. It would be a bit like diluting the karma, the way that in some Buddhist traditions, there is considered to be less and less of a karmic charge as you move from being the one who kills an animal to the one who cuts it up, the one who cooks it, the one who eats it, the one who tosses the bones and washes the plate….
And here I am, back to animals! That seems to be the crux of the difficulty for me: that I perceive my inanimate objects (even those that aren’t representations of people or animals) as at least quasi-animate. If only there were a way—like removing software from an electronic device—to drain the soul force from my objects. Then it would be much easier for me to give away the husk! I think this is, to some degree, what Marie Kondo is attempting when she holds an object in her hands and thanks it before letting it go: There’s an acknowledgment, and then a readiness to transfer—if not to drain—the anima of the object. But again, for me this little ritual is usually not strong enough to break the bond.
Ican’t, in some way, decommission my belongings. Might there be another way that I could preserve whatever it is—their souls, their mana, their juju, their chi—that wouldn’t involve physically possessing them?
Praising, that’s it! wrote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in his Sonnets to Orpheus. Though he lived and died over a hundred years ago, he already felt acutely aware of the imminent disappearance of the world into which he had been born. In this world, your gaze might easily fall upon an object that bore the imprint of human hands: a clay pitcher, a wooden hoe, a pair of leather work boots. Such objects were saturated with human meaning, woven into the history and daily life of the people who used them. But now they were being replaced by what he called “sham things, dummy things,” mass-produced in America. For Rilke, the solution was to recreate the vanishing things internally: to remember them, paint them, write about them in a way that attained the same “valence,” while granting them another form of existence. If this notion seems a bit esoteric, it might help to imagine people facing other forms of imminent loss: a grandparent going blind who tries to memorize the faces of his grandchildren; a refugee imprinting the fragrant air of her garden before fleeing; a person facing death who is determined to summon the most vivid memories of a lifetime before letting go….
When body and mind are in order, everything else exists in the right place, in the right way.
Even as I’ve been remembering Rilke, this line from Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind has been ringing in my mind like a bell. Though I am moved by Rilke’s vow to save certain earthly things by giving them another mode of existence, it does seem very effortful to me. In contrast, Suzuki Roshi seems to be suggesting a way of living among the things of this world that is profoundly natural and easeful.
But what would that be? What does it mean to have body and mind so aligned with the very nature of reality that, all around one, everything appears to be in a state of perfection, such that nothing appears out of place or in need of any form of alteration whatsoever, and there are no decisions to be made regarding any object’s status, its coming or going, or state of belonging?
In the great trove of seekers’ stories that have come to us over the ages, there are many accounts of people intensely perceiving the supreme rightness or perfection of the world around them. In one such story, a woman marvels that “the wall meets the floor, the wall meets the floor!” In another, a man realizes “the birds sing without my doing anything!” In yet another, a woman leaves the meditation hall to take a walk and discovers that the broken bottles by the side of the road are dazzling like jewels. From my own life, I have written before of a startling experience I had many years ago, during a three-month retreat at a Zen monastery in northern California. Assigned to run the garbage composter on a hot summer day, I initially felt so overwhelmed by the stench of rotting food that I thought I was going to faint. But after an hour or so, something shifted—so much so, that after lunch, I went running back to my steaming pile of orange rinds, eggshells, potato peelings, and soggy tea bags, as to a lover.
If only there were a way—like removing software from an electronic device—to drain the soul force from my objects.
Hakuin Zenji tells us, “The Great Way is not difficult for those who do not pick and choose.” But isn’t such a radical letting go of distinctions the very opposite of what is required when it comes to sorting through and letting go of our belongings? Any organizing system I’ve ever encountered begins with distinctions, whether with bins or boxes marked “Keep,” “Give Away,” “Trash,” and/or with various guiding principles like, “Have nothing that isn’t either beautiful or useful” or “If it doesn’t spark joy, let it go.” And isn’t it precisely the radical absence of distinctions, the view of everything as equally valuable, that lies at the very heart of hoarding? For a while, I confess, I compulsively watched the reality TV series about hoarders, and I have never forgotten a little boy who lived with his mother in their hoarded house. He was showing early signs of the disorder himself, and at one point—when the professional organizer and her staff were trying to clear a path through the bedroom—he cried out, “But that’s my favorite cotton ball!”
To even be able to conceive of a “favorite cotton ball” would seem to be a serious category mistake, revealing a complete absence of the hierarchy of value that is necessary to maintain order in our homes, so that we don’t hang on to trash, expired food, and objects broken beyond repair, as is the tendency of so many hoarders, for whom nearly every single thing is “favorite”—in the sense of not being easily parted with. Along with hierarchy of value, there is also differentiation of function, so that we don’t find pots and pans in the bedroom and toothbrushes and toothpaste in the living room. So what could it possibly mean to let go of all distinctions, such that we see everything as equally precious, everything as existing, in and of itself, in the right place in the right way, without our needing to tamper with it in any way—yet without thereby allowing us to slip into the distinction-less horror of hoarding?
Of course, the answer is that seeing things as equally present is not the same as seeing every cotton ball, tissue, or hairpin as “my favorite.” It is to cease seeing things through the lens of their meaning and usefulness to myself. And when we are able to do this, it makes room for the world around us to come forward, with extraordinary vividness. Birds sing, the wall meets the floor, and even a mound of stinking garbage shimmers in the sunlight…
The wonderful thing is that the world is always ready to be seen in this way! When I practice this mode of seeing, I might not always experience the shimmering vividness, but what nearly always happens is that a field of neutrality arises. At the very least, it’s as though I am transported to someone else’s terrain, where a certain detachment helps me to savor what I see without feeling the need to assess or alter it in any way. In a friend’s yard, I can appreciate the way a collapsed wooden shed or a mobile made of old CDs seem simply to belong to their surroundings. In the same way, friends often express their appreciation of both my garden and my study—two places where I usually feel overwhelmed by the need to weed, prune, sort, file, and discard….
And here’s the strange, paradoxical thing: When I am able to summon the field of neutrality in my own surroundings, I find that I can more easily make distinctions! When I am no longer weighing things on the scale of what they mean to me, then my anxiety about having to decide their fate diminishes. In this state of greater equanimity, I can more calmly choose what to keep, and what to send along its way.
Simultaneously, another shift happens: The quasi-animate nature of my belongings begins to manifest as a kind of autonomy. I become able to see that each of my belongings bears its own fate and will have its own journey once we are parted. Who knows what that journey will be? I have no idea where the rubber zebra, circa 1940, found himself before I discovered him in his sailor suit on a thrift store shelf, circa 2000. And for the first time, it occurs to me that rather than trying to steel my heart and wrench him away from me, I could trust that he will find his way to the next episode in the unfolding saga that belongs to him, not me.
If this episode should require a bit of intervention on the part of my much younger sister, my daughter, or granddaughters—is that really such a terrible thing? During my mother’s final illness, I had the task of dismantling her apartment in southern France. Though she was not a pack rat, it was still an enormous labor. Yet as I sorted through the belongings that she had cherished enough to save, I began to feel something essential about her being coalesce in the atmosphere around me, in the smell of turpentine that still lingered about her paintings, in her extravagant collection of postcards, in the first drafts of the beautiful letters she wrote to her friends and family…. There was a certain sacramental quality to the experience, and remembering it now, I feel ready to make this vow:
I will do my best to get rid of everything that is truly useless, ugly, expired, redundant, and/or devoid of emotional resonance. But I am not going to drive myself to leave a perfectly curated environment. I don’t know what my next of kin will feel when they have to decide what to do with the ceramic head I bought for my father when I was 6, or the moose for whom somebody stitched a pair of flannel trousers. But I will be sure to place in a prominent spot the bookmark that a friend recently sent me, with this quote from Shunryu Suzuki: “We treat things very carefully. And we respect things very much. Everything itself is Buddha. So we treat it as Buddha.”