I have always wanted to live somewhere cute. I’m moving to Boulder in the fall, and I will be living in a cute attic. It is cute, but it is not large, and I’m realizing I have to get rid of quite a bit of my stuff to achieve the cuteness (plus, you know, livability) that I long for. This letting-go of material possessions (these clothes, those many books I’ll never read, that weird collection of twigs from some long-forgotten forest trail) has been both practical and spiritual, and I do feel lighter.
Concurrently, my digestive tract is on strike, protesting the labor conditions I have been subjecting it to. It appears that this worker, essential to my system, does not want me to eat most things. Its gentle requests have long gone unheeded (unnoticed, even) and so now it’s expressing its opinions through the mediums of nausea and bloating. This is somewhat challenging to me (the management), but I’m trying to do well by my digestive tract by listening to its demands. And so yesterday for lunch I drank cabbage juice and ate some deli ham. Later, I threw away a large volume of soup.
Standing in the grocery checkout line, or after a thrift store drop-off, I viscerally feel something my brain has known for a while: my new minimalisms are facilitated by being wealthier now than I used to be. It feels okay to let stuff go because I can afford to buy that stuff again if it turns out I made a mistake. I can afford to buy new and often expensive foods if it feels right in the moment, even though I don’t yet know if my digestive system will approve. Money can buy you the space to be wrong; it can buy you self-forgiveness.
The only place where, before now, letting go has felt safe is writing. Or more specifically, editing. If I can let go of stuff now, or shift and shrink the foods I eat, it’s because, thanks to over a decade of writing and editing, I can trust that when I bring intention to how I wield a cutting knife, when I first bring compassion and appreciation for all of something, then beauty can emerge from removal. Writing is an easy space in which to get comfortable with letting go, because words are cheap, the supply of words from my brain is seemingly inexhaustible, and good words can be found again. Plus, there is poetry, where concision can be everything and we know how to appreciate a certain sparseness. My cute attic will be poetic.
[I’m very into this idea, at the moment, of the ways in which our practices translate across and through our lives. Who knew that years of editing would help to fulfill my home fantasies?! What a delight.]
[This is also as good a place as any to note my long-brewing disdain for what I think is a trend towards writing that is too long for no good reason, both online and in print. I HATE IT! I also know that I write long shit, and saying this out loud will come back to haunt me, but I just…cannot.]
In this sprawling context, I found it interesting to read an article this morning about how the human brain (in its contemporary sociopolitical contexts) appears to gravitate towards adding rather than subtracting to solve problems (it’s a summary of some research; I didn’t read the original paper). Which is to say, we tend to add more structural support to a piece that’s falling over rather than removing and reconfiguring the pieces into something more stable, form a new committee instead of reckoning with how the old committee didn’t meet its objectives, say more and more instead of sitting in silence to listen. So many positive, potent words–creative, generative, growing–are about adding. While reading this article, I wondered about where our brains get to practice removal, and immediately thought of editing. “Editing is so much about subtraction!” I thought, “our brains can do this!” And the article concurs–indeed we can remove, when we are reminded that removal is an option.
Ultimately, I suppose that’s what it’s all about: options. We have choices about whether to add or remove, about how precisely to both accept and let go.
But the choices that we feel are available to us depend on our feelings of safety. Given my recent realization about the privilege of feeling financially secure that, for me, has been the precursor to letting go, I balked at this part of the article:
For instance, when people feel dissatisfied with the decor of their home, they might address the situation by going on a spending spree and acquiring more furniture — even if it would be equally effective to get rid of a cluttering coffee table. Such a tendency might be particularly pronounced for resource-deprived consumers, who tend to be particularly focused on acquiring material goods [Tully et al. 2015]. This not only harms those consumers’ financial situations, but also increases the strain on our environment.
I balked at the authors’ tone of smug condescension towards those of us that buy and keep things. Clicking through to the citation, I found that the original article does not employ a similar tone. In fact, the study is nothing like how it is represented in the above quote: the study focuses on people who feel financially constrained (which is different from “resource-deprived”) and specifically contrasts purchasing goods with purchasing experiences, a pretty different situation than the above paragraph extrapolates to. I am angered by how these authors misrepresented a research finding to make an uncompassionate and classist point, and I am letting go of this anger by writing about it.
Last fall, my partner and I made a planter box for my apartment window. We filled it with soil that we knew had seeds in it, we haphazardly transplanted in a vine or two, and later I planted seeds and cuttings from time to time but mostly let the forces-that-be populate this little plot of suspended earth. All kinds of things grew. At one point, the box was taken over by Oxalis. I expected this, because of where the soil had come from. I let their bright yellow blooms be for a month or two before deciding it was time to make room for the others. The timing was serendipitously perfect, and the others grew well. But the dried stems of morning glory, the dried marigold–they remain, and I will not remove them because they are not in anybody’s way and I will not accept that they are ugly. They can go when we all feel ready.
Ambika Kamath 