Yup, you guessed it. This is the time of year wherein many people make a New Year's resolution. Now, we all know there is nothing magical about making such a resolution. Many resolutions we make are utterly forgettable and within months...or weeks.. or even days, we have forgotten them.
The urge is very normal, and even commendable. Most resolutions focus on some aspect of self-improvement. We vow to do something to make ourselves better--lose weight, exercise more, have lunch with friends more frequently, write more, read more, etc. The list goes on. And all those goals we set are worthy.
But we also know how easy it is to forget. To say--well, just for today, I don't need to ____. (Fill in the blank.) And, next thing you know, the resolution falls discarded by the wayside. Give us eleven months and we will revisit the ritual. Make resolution, implement resolution, forget resolution, regret resolution, revive resolution. It takes about 12 months for this process to work out.
So, this year, I decided--only ONE resolution. And the title gives it away: de-clutter. My solemn resolution is one drawer at a time, one closet, one corner, one room--one whatever. Just to slowly and surely go through "things" and decide what can be given away (Freecycle), what can be donated (Goodwill or Salvation Army), what should be given to our children (heirlooms...), and what should be placed in the trash.
Considering the amount of stuff we have, this process SHOULD take me a year. Oh, and for inspiration, I have already watched George Carlin's classic routine on STUFF. He nails it--we get stuff, then we need a bigger place to store our stuff, then we need more stuff to fill the bigger space.
This persistent drive toward acquisition is one of the themes I have returned to several times: here, and here for example. In the second link, I talk about giving items...OK, stuff...to Freecycle. At the time I wrote that (2008), I counted that we had given away 140 items. The count today stands at over 300 items.
So, de-cluttering? You bet. Should take me all year.
Only a hermit living in an isolated cave can be unaware of the financial crisis which grips the world. These times are indeed frightening. But I find myself thinking comforting thoughts—the gist of which is this: what we are living through is NOT new in human history.
That’s right—there have been hard times before. And people have survived.
When our son was in grade school, one of his teachers gave the class an assignment—interview your grandparents. Ask them what it was like to live in the Great Depression. So, when he was with his grandparents, our son began asking questions. Grandpa, what was life like for you during the Depression. Same question to Grandma.
The curious thing is that is the only time I ever heard stories from my parents about the Depression years. I just never thought to ask.
My mother’s family probably fared a little better than my dad’s. My mother’s family were mostly farmers. I previously told my mother’s story here, but a few details serve now. My maternal grandfather owned a dairy farm. Of course, that was hard work, but it also meant there was food. They had their own garden, milk readily available, probably eggs too if they had chickens, which they must have. My mother did say that clothing was harder to get—so she and her sisters used the feed sacks, which were printed with floral designs, to make into dresses.
My dad’s family made the trek from Oklahoma to California, but not for the reasons immortalized in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. My dad’s family moved, so his father could teach at a college in southern California. It was a small church-related school, so my grandfather’s salary was not lavish. Part of his compensation was the fact that his children could attend the college. (When this provision was removed from his contract, it resulted in my grandfather losing his job—but that’s another story, told here.)
My dad has said that while the family always had food, there were times when only one item was served for dinner. If they had potatoes, well, that was what they had for dinner—potatoes. My dad and his brothers also worked—in their pre-teen and teen years, and contributed some of the money earned to the family finances.
My aunt, my father’s sister, recalls that a few years beyond the Great Depression, as World War II was gearing up, that they had a Victory garden. I don’t know if they called it that, but it was a large vegetable garden where much of the produce they ate was grown.
The Depression was not the only hard times that we have been through. World War II was surely an example of hard times, for many countries. Yet, with all the difficulties that people experienced during the war, people still married and had children. My parents married in 1942 and I was born two months before the end of the war in Europe.
Hard times—yes. We are in hard times—whether at the beginning, or in the middle, or even near the end, only time will reveal. As our family stories can instruct us, there are many things we can do to survive.
And we will survive hard times. We always have.
In a prior blog I referenced George Carlin’s brilliant routine on Stuff. When I use that essay in one of my classes at the community college where I teach, I frequently get these blank stares when I ask students—why do we have all this “stuff”? It is easy for them to jot down a list of the stuff they own, but they are challenged when it comes to putting forth a reasonable explanation of WHY.
Our present national obsession with more and more acquisition really troubles me. We are no longer satisfied with the type of houses that dominated the housing boom post-World War II. Now, mega-mansions spring up, replacing the 2,000 to 3,000 square foot homes with ones that are 11,000 square feet. Our houses must be bigger, our cars ever expanding (witness the obscene Hummers), and our meals super-sized. It is no surprise that our bodies are expanding, resulting in increased sizing of everything needed to hold us, including eventually caskets! That’s right—there is now a line of larger caskets to hold the super-sized deceased.
Growing up in a church with Anabaptist roots, I came to appreciate the emphasis on simplicity in living. One of the visionary thinkers in this regard was Doris Janzen Longacre, who compiled the book Living more with less . Published more than 25 years ago, this book is a collection of tips on how to live more frugally and simply. It is also much more than that—in many of the examples, we Americans are challenged by the ways in which people in emerging countries value things we take for granted. One particular example I recall is that of a woman who had lived in a country where people did not throw away envelopes in which the mail came. Rather, they carefully sliced the envelope open, so it would lie flat and provide a new sheet of paper ready to receive whatever needed to be written. I think of that example as I contend with the daily mail we receive, much of it uninvited. 
The church I attend (Market Square Presbyterian Church) houses an international service center. When this work first began, it was founded by Vietnamese refugees who helped their fellow country folk resettle in this country after the close of the Vietnam "conflict." During a recent renovation of our church, their offices were moved. To accomplish the move, the office staff for this center needed to dispose of used electronic equipment that had been donated. The result was a wrenching experience, since having done “without” for so long, they were loathe to part with equipment, even though these machines no longer worked. Contrast this approach to the easy disposable society most of us live in. Several years ago, I heard the late senator Paul Simon speak at a Presbyterian conference. He challenged attendees to think about producing annual reports that included a Matthew 25 report. Senator Simon thought that every church should be able to report what we had done during any given year to feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, and visit the sick and imprisoned. When we become so focused on “stuff” that we lose sight of the least of these, then we have surely lost our souls.
