Know Thy Shelf: the wisdom in your stuff

Greetings Uplifters! Take with me another small step into the magical world of the uplift game. Essentially this game is about relationships, but that starts with your relationship to yourself. One window into that most important relationship is to look at what you own and ask how much energy it gives you. I‘m talking about your stuff.

Just as Socrates urged us to ”Know thy self”, I find it apt as a privileged member of a hyper-consumerist culture to coin a spin-off of that aphorism and say, Know Thy Shelf.

That is, many of us as people of privilege are faced with an embarrassing problem, we have too much stuff, too much of clothes, too much food, too many gadgets, to much information, too many coffee mugs, too many toothbrushes, and too many emails. This creates a problem, as inevitably this gathering of stuff creates a scarcity of space.

We have abundance anxiety. And in this anxiety we have become alienated from the purpose of much of what we own. Cue the sombre violins.

What the heck is going on!?

This is what The Uplift Game is meant to mitigate. It’s an attempt to bring the spirit of play to the spirit of minimalism by focusing on a small corner of your world, your home.

All of this “too muchness” falls in its own specific categories. Pots stuff the kitchen cabinets, clothes stuff the closet, and medicine stuffs the medicine cabinets. If you think about it, each category is a network of relationships, and everything in that category is a part of that network of relationships.

As an example, in organizing a basket full of supplements, I came across a bottle of zinc I bought when I was sick a couple of years back. It’s been two years and I may have only taken the pills a handful of times. There may have been times I might have needed them, but I forgot about them. This speaks to my lack of awareness of the vitamins I have and their uses. I failed to take full opportunity of what once held a promise for my health. If I don’t use them, they will be useless in 6 months.

So it’s not just about the Zinc. The Zinc speaks to the broader issue of a relative unconsciousness in my relationship to my health and the medicines that support it.

I can do this all day long with anything in my house. What’s up with all the expired food in the fridge? This speaks to my carelessness in meal planning and opportunity cost in optimizing my relationship to food. What about the clothes in my closet I no longer wear? This speaks to a hoarding tendency and my indecisiveness around how I wish to present myself to the world. How about all those chords, chargers, and electronic gadgets trapped in boxes and drawers. Surely this speaks to my reluctance to honor my desire to learn and integrate technology in my life. That’s a fancy way of saying that I’m afraid of technology.

All of my messes reflect my particular level of unconciousness in relationship to my stuff. The apple core I found under my bed, that boguet of old toothbrushes in a beer mug, the underwear wedged in the crevice of my couch. Never mind!

So I guess I‘m a toothbrush hoarder. If you’re like me, you haven’t always had the healthiest relationship to your things. This is a problem with three parts.

1. Too much coming in

2. The stuff is not being optimally utilized

3. Insufficient purging rituals

Riddle me this, what do your things represent? Status? Success? Worthiness?

Consider that what your things represent is hope. That gorgeous flannel shirt; that new car; that juicer; that electronic gadget. The enthusiasm that compelled you to throw down hard earned cash for it was made of a hope that a thing would make your life better. Marketers are geniuses at tapping into that hope, going so far as making you think you are not enough without that magic product.

They as advertisers, and we as consumers have conspired to ingrain in our psyches a an insidious sense of “I’m not enough.”

They have your back on helping you focus when it comes to buying that thing. They’ll display it in all its magestic glory, as the sunlight glistens off the edge of the products statuesque display against the backdrop of a tropical beach. You can almost hear the frothy waves lapping against the sparkling sands. Can you feel it? That’s hope; that’s peace; that’s our new line of mango infused vitamin B fortified energy drinks.

So, enthralled by the moment, we buy the promise of the product, the hope that it is the final piece to make us whole, to make us “enough.”

But what if what we need is not another mango infused energy drink, but to become better at honoring what we already have, to bring the inspiration of the commercial into the duration of the relationship with your stuff. This goes for all our clothes, gadgets, and groceries. This speaks to our embarrassing problem of abundance in this hyper-consumerist culture. The stuff we own begins owning us.

How much of what we’ve acquired is actually a vibrant part of our home. I dare say that many of us are surrounded by neglected things. They’re misfit toys relegated to forgotten corners of our homes, victims of our buying addictions.

Maybe it’s up to us to either get rid of those misfit toys, or else reinvigorate them with the promise it held for you in the moment of sale by using the damn thing. And it would be easier to use it if you knew where it was, and still easier if it wasn’t buried in the clutter. And what is buried in the clutter is hope, neglected hope. That’s right, many of us are surrounded by neglected hope. Sounds uplifting, don’t it?

This is Obvious if you ever watched the show, ’Hoarders.’ There are people absolutely overtaken by their things, living in a jungle of junk. If you observe the declutter coach work with them to let go of anything, they’ll fight tooth and claw!

”No, I need that because…..!”

What that means is that they still imbue that thing with hope that it will one day provide for their needs at some magical time in the future.

Do those hoarders know something we don’t know? Is That dusty thing providing hope, or is it taking it away?

Maybe the hope is in the letting go, in the space we create for new life to pour in. And the rest of us, who don’t have such obvious hoarding problems, have the same issue on smaller scales. The thought being….

“We might need it one day!”

Bulls&@! What we need is to let go. Life is not in that thing. Life is in the space we create to foster new moments; new memories, new joy. The way is simple; we need less junk and more space. Our life needs a purge, or better yet, a consistent practice of purging. Our home, our small corner of the world, is a great place to start.

We can practice tiny experiments in creating this space by attending to our things from a new spirit of play. The game here is as simple as me setting aside time to face that boquet of toothbrushes in my beer mug and responding to three basic questions.

1. What do I keep?

2. What do I throw away?

3. What do I donate?

Alright maybe the third question doesn’t apply with toothbrushes, but it applies to most other things.

But when we confront our little domestic messes and excesses with more conscious attention, we exchange wisdom with them. We encounter our habits, our values, and begin to discover new ways of being in the world. We begin to Know Thy Shelf.

What if we heeded that Socrates inspired aphoristic spinoff’? What if we went through the process of sorting through our things, letting go of stuff that doesn’t serve us, and using stuff that would serve us if we attended to them. Maybe we would find some wisdom in that process, wisdom that may even spill over into to our lives. This is one conversation I’m trying to start with these silly blogs, and with the Uplift Game.

And in the space that we create when we practice our purges, we fill with activities that inspire us. We can enjoy it in solitude, or invite friends over for dance parties, or potluck book groups, or jam sessions, or painting marathons, or share a beer with mom. Wouldn’t that be more life giving? Uplifting even?

Thanks for reading! I hope you find that philosophical exploration to be a useful nudge toward wisdom, toward Knowing Thy Shelf, toward creating more space in your life, especially for hope.

mike greca

theupliftgame.com