(Deut. 15:18)
I don't keep human slaves, and I don't believe in such keeping, but I do keep material slaves. Beyond the things I have in my life that I put to good use on a daily, weekly, or even annual basis, I keep things far beyond their function to me.
When we moved across the country last summer, I gave away an incredible amount of what my mother taught me to call "junque" when I was a kid, a term she placed on the box of things that didn't fit in any good category but which I refused to part with. Apparently, I have accumulated a lot of junque. Last year I finally got rid of piles of books about topics I have no longer study or work with, furniture and clothing that I rarely or never used, tchatchkes (trinkets - pick your word) that my inner child had forced me to hold onto, and many broken things I kept promising myself I would fix.
I acquired this desk one summer when someone paid me to clean out and paint their basement. "Get rid of the desk." I brought it home. After all, I was a poor college student, applying at the time for graduate school, and sure to both be poverty stricken and in need of a desk for years to come.
The irony -- which came to me as an epiphany the other day when I read Stephen King's words On Writing, "It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room" -- is that I don't use a desk. King uses a desk, and his belongs in the corner, not the middle or the room (he also had an epiphany). My writing space, my working space, is a chair or a couch or often enough sitting up in bed. I use a desk when I have to - at work - but not on my own time.
I didn't know this, though, and I moved the desk from my Ohio undergraduate apartment to my Indiana grad student house, then on to Pennsylvania for rabbinical school. I cannot remember where the desk was in our Philly apartment -- it's possible I stored it those years, because there I acquired an IKEA desk with more drawer space. I took both desks with me to New Hampshire, and the old one had an honored spot in our sunroom, where it rarely accumulated too many stacks, and where my husband frequently sat. I sat next to it in the chaise, as I had the other desk in Philly. And then I moved both desks to Connecticut, where the newer one became a desk I sat at a handful of times, and the old one became my son's changing table. When we moved to Seattle, the IKEA desk went to the curb in the great purge, but this old desk came with, still sturdy and, I thought, functional.
Currently, this desk sits in my living room gathering stacks of things. I have sat at it maybe twice in the year we have been here. At Hanukkah it held our various menorahs. But mostly it has stacks of things that get put there, then buried, deeper and deeper until I am forced into an archaeological dig either by avalanche or by a need to find something.
Still, I haven't decided if or how to get it out of my house. We don't have storage space, and besides, storing it for some theoretical use in some unknown time in the future feels absurd. I know if I put it out on the curb or put a note up on my local "buy-nothing" page, it will be gone in short order, and to someone who will surely put it to good use.
Why is it so hard? This week's Parasha reminds us that the difficulty of letting go is common, but that to do so honors the place that thing, idea, or yes, person, has had in our lives. I am also convinced that letting go makes room in our lives for things, ideas, and people we can't anticipate.
Yep, the desk I have held onto for more than twenty years, still with names and phone numbers penned on it by the previous owner, is all but gone.
No comments:
Post a Comment