Step Into My Time Machine
STEP INTO MY TIME MACHINE
My younger self was mighty surprised when I showed up. But there was no time for pleasantries. I had fifteen minutes and I was determined not to waste them. I just started rifling through her stuff as she stood there astonished.
When she finally grabbed my arm, I brushed her hand away and gave the speech I had prepared. (Always a good practice when time traveling.) I told her who I was and from whence I had come, and most importantly, why I was there.
I am a declutterer by nature. I find a cluttered and disorganized living space to be a source of distraction. I like for everything to have its place and for there to be a logical order to things.
Creating order is difficult, but maintaining order is even more difficult. Things come and go. At first, they mostly come. This is the stage of acquisition. But in childhood, things get outgrown quickly.
I discarded the things I had outgrown, as if to say, I am no longer this person. I cast off all that was incongruous with my new persona. Each phoenix-like rebirth was predicated on the complete incineration of the previous incarnation.
Later there were the moves. Each time I changed apartments, I purged the things I no longer needed or wanted: clothes, books, furniture, trinkets, mementos.
In the past I was more interested in order than minimalism. Apart from the hassles of moving, I wasn’t much bothered by the amount of things I owned. I was only bothered by crowding and disorder.
For most of my life the urge to acquire outpaced the urge to declutter, so more things were coming in than going out. It took quite a while before more things were going out than coming in. I’ll call this phase middle age. It coincides with nostalgia. I find myself easily discarding the dross I have accumulated in later years and missing the things from my early years, the things I tossed away so insouciantly.
I discovered late that I needed not only to acquire the right things; I also needed to not discard the wrong things. But back then, things were merely things: stupid things or awesome things, but still just things. Now things hold memories of people, places, phases of my life that I would not otherwise remember.
It’s curious that things can do this, but they can. For proof, I submit this example. I picked up an old paperback book. It is one of the few I kept from my college days. When I opened it there was a Barnes & Noble receipt inside. The ink unfaded. I bought that book in the Fifth Avenue store on November 12, 1984.
That little slip of paper is physical evidence of my past existence. My existence here and now is not proof of my earlier existence. I merely assume that I existed in 1984 because I accept certain conventional beliefs about the nature of time and reality. I know in my head that I existed in 1984, but that’s just an abstract fact.
When I took that receipt out of that book, the continuity of my existence became concrete and tangible. That heavily tanned book is the real thing. Some Barnes & Noble cashier sold it to me one day in that bookstore. Was it cold that November day? Had I taken the subway from home, or did I pop down there after class? I will never remember those details. But I have evidence that it all happened.
If only more treasures from the past had survived the succession of purges that has been my life with things! And this brings me to declutterer extraordinaire Marie Kondo. I was curious about her philosophy. I wanted to know why she likes to tidy, or as I usually express it, to create order.
Kondo does not disappoint. She tells a little about her childhood, about being a loner, about her complicated relationships with things. She also shares her theory on the urge to declutter. She connects it to the desire to declutter and order our lives. I could relate to this. Like Kondo, I also crave order and simplicity.
But when she said I was going to read very few of my books again, I could only smile and say: “Have you met me?”
To be fair, I wasn’t always a rereader. In my youth, I never reread. There were too many unread books for me to give any book a second reading. But that changed after I read C. S Lewis’ Experiment in Criticism. That book plus nostalgia inspired me to reread some of the books of my youth.
It has been very rewarding to re-experience books I first read twenty, thirty, forty or more years ago and connect with my younger self. (Metaphorically connect that is, not literally like when I showed up in her room with that ridiculous time travel helmet on my head.)
But back to minimalism.
When I was young I discarded stuff left and right. Now I know better. There’s nothing like holding an artifact in my hands, making a tactile connection with a real thing from the past. That book I plucked off the shelf of a Manhattan bookstore in 1984 is the same book I now hold in my hands. It is more than mere paper. It is a relic from an earlier time and an earlier incarnation of me.
They say the cells in our bodies are replaced every seven years. While this may not be scientifically true, it is poetically true. We are always being remade, both physically and psychologically.
Our bodies change. The young woman who bought that book had not a gray hair on her head. And our personae change as well. Many a style, affectation, and pastime have I adopted and then abandoned in my quest to “find myself.” In contrast, the receipt inside that paper book is the same as it was all those years ago. That little bit of paper is less ephemeral than I am.
Memory, says Locke, is what creates the continuity of the self. So what happens when memories are lost? Is some fragment of the self lost with each lost memory?
My younger self did not know the value of so many of the things she tossed away. How could she? It is only in retrospect that those things have value.
The middle ground between saving too much and saving too little is to save just the right things, just the things that will have the most sentimental value later. But how does one know which things are the right things? I’ll leave that question for others to answer. I took the easy way out.
As she stood there hardly believing her eyes, I raided her closets, piling up all the things I wanted her to save. By the time my fifteen minutes were up it looked like the 70s exploded in the middle of her room.
As I felt myself fading away, I used my final second to shout one last piece of advice: Mind that opal. It was an heirloom ring. I wore it every day until I carelessly cracked the stone. I’ll know soon enough if she heard me.