In my youth I would have regular clear outs in order to simplify my life, lighten the load, and make it easier to travel anywhere at the drop of a hat. I was proud, at one stage, to have just 3 bags: books, clothes, bedding. I could move house in less than 30 minutes! Then I got married, had children, grew up, and without even trying or meaning to, started to accumulate stuff like crazy.

The stuff kept on increasing -- breeding like they say coat hangers do when no one is watching -- and with each move there was more and more of it. Instead of doing something creative, meaningful, or fun, I would spend increasing amounts of my free time tidying and sorting, putting up shelves, and boarding out lofts. Now and again I managed to dump a few things, but it made little difference. Something was wrong. Somehow I was in service to my possessions. Instead of possessing them they had, in some strange way, come to possess me.

When my aunt died in 2017, I stepped in to help my uncle tidy up their chaotic London flat where nothing had been thrown away for 30 years. I worked like an archaeologist, burrowing carefully through layers, picking out the important stuff, and discarding the dross. It took 3 weeks of 10 hour days, and I can still remember the smile on my uncle's face when I showed him into his 'new' bedroom. He sat on the bed playing his guitar like a bird released.

At the end of 2021 my mother died, and in early 2022 I started clearing her rented cottage in which multiple streams of stuff had merged into one great river. Stuff from mum, my ancestors, my other uncle who died in 2005, my brother who had moved to America 20 years before, and the aforementioned uncle who had also just sadly died. All of this stuff became my responsibility, and I began drowning in it.

I recalled an old Sufi saying, wrote it down, and put it up on the kitchen wall: "You only have what you would not lose in a shipwreck." When stuck deciding about what to do with something I would ask myself: "if I was on a sinking ship would I bother with this?" It helped. I stopped feeling like the mad curator of some private museum that nobody would ever pay to visit, and began to make progress.

When Lalena and I moved to South Africa, with her patient and compassionate support I completed another phase of letting things go, and got a little closer to understanding what really matters in life: the things that you would not lose in a shipwreck. And the ease with which we shed stuff when we left to come back is, as they say, another story :)