Letting go of containers

Since I've been vigilant and diligent about removing crap, I have much less need to contain my world. In the past few days, I've let go of a hundred containers--various vessels from vases and trays to acrylic cosmetic cases, plastic ikea boxes and aluminum tin trays. I can't even remember what I got rid of--and it was only hours ago I let them go! I took the time to wash each item in hot sudsy water. Now that I'm exclusively buying used items, I want the items from my home to recirculate in the world in their best condition for all those other like-minded people who are buying used.

Containers are not the solution. Containers contribute to the problem by giving a false solution that mystifies the real problem. The real problem is you have too much and you need to remove that stuff from your house! Containers enable middle-class approved hoarding--all those neat boxes with labels, just like Martha! But the dread of having too much crap remains, enervating you of hope for a truly clean home.

Containers can multiply with their sly appearance of usefulness, cluttering up pantries, closets and garages waiting to be used 'someday.' But this is precisely their menacing power. They beckon us to fill them with crap, to buy duplicates, and to store unloved things that might help someone else if we'd only free up the contained.

Containers waste your time. You sort your crap into different containers, label them, put them away. But then, you have more crap that you want to hide in the back closet, so you open, close and shift your containers, re-shifting them here to there to another there in a perpetual search for more space.

You can have more space. Get rid of the things you're hiding. If whatever's in the container is for 'someday,' that is a clue it needs to be removed immediately. If it's for some concrete date in the calendar system (the turkey roaster for thanksgiving, for instance), then it has dignity and reason to take up room in your home. Chances are, you can replace what you are storing/hiding easily when 'someday' actually materializes.

By removing the someday clutter, you are learning to redeem yourself of your crapitalist shopping habits. We have been taught to experience shopping as a leisure activity, as if browsing in stores was a fulfilling mode of being. No--browsing is for ghosts, alienated people disconnected from nature and community who embalm their loneliness with lifeless things, while pretending buying something equals an accomplishment. It does not. Sorry. I was there. I purchased many a stupid things and wasted thousands of dollars. Removing these poor judgment purchases is what finally revealed to me I have been a thoughtless and wretched accumulator of crap in the service of corporate global crapitalism. I was suckered by false desires.

I'm by no means perfect now. But I feel so much lighter and happier without the stuff it's like a miracle!

I no longer feel compelled to house and protect things useless to me now.

There's no little voice demanding: clean, organize, clean, organize. Without the crap, the chatter has dissipated. This is such an empowering feeling--I would like everyone to feel it.