This is my guide to getting rid of stuff. By “throw it out”… I mean recycle it, give it to someone, take it to Goodwill, sell it on E-bay… but get rid of it. And no using E-bay as an excuse to prolong things. If it doesn’t sell fast, recycle it.

1) You do not need old shoe boxes to keep “stuff” you might need to put in a shoe box someday. First find the stuff… then worry about the box. For now, just throw the damn box out.

2) If you haven’t used it or needed it in the last year, you don’t need it. Throw it out.

3) If it’s clothing and no one you know would wear it, then for you and yours it is not clothing. Maybe someone else will value it. Throw it out.

4) Just because you needed it to write your dissertation 10 years ago, that’s no reason to hang on to it. Throw it out.

5) With a few rare exceptions, if it’s a toy for young children, and your children are 7 and 11, don’t save it for your grandchildren. Throw it out.

6) Make a list of what matters to you. Call it a mission statement. Make every object pass the mission critical test. Do I need this particular piece of dusty plastic to do what I am most about doing on planet Earth? Don’t expect that much is going to meet that test, and consider that a good thing. Apply the list, and throw stuff out. Then throw the list out too.

7) I used to feel (back in the 1990s) that a home full of books was a statement about who I was as a scholar and intellectual. Now the library and the intertubes can meet every imaginable information need for adults. If you haven’t used or read that book in the last few months… throw it out.

8) Children’s books? Well you can’t throw those away… not while you have children.

9) If you don’t need it but still can’t give it up, then take a photo of it. Print the photo. Put the photo in a notebook. There. You have the memory, and a photo takes up a lot less space. Now, throw it out. (Next year you can throw out all the inexplicable pictures of forgotten basement junk.)

10) You’re not the problem… it’s your spouse, right? If only he/she could be made to focus on the junk and get rid of stuff, then the basement/attic would suddenly be clean. Well, sit down together and do the mission/goals/plans exercise together, for each of you and for both of you. Then poke around the basement and ask her/him how the rocking-horse and the bungee cord and baby puzzles are connected to his/her mission… and to your joint mission. If the two of you can’t connect an object to your separate and joint purposes on Earth… throw it away.

11) While you are sorting through the stuff by yourself, make a pile near the door. That’s the stuff that you are definitely done with. Invite your spouse to go through it and see if you’ve accidentally included anything of value. But gently force the question, simply by asking it. This is the stuff that I’d like to get rid of… how do you feel about that? With any luck your spouse will realize, most of the time, that the only thing to do is… throw it out.

12) “This might be useful someday” is not a reason to keep something. Be real. What will it be useful for? And how does that use relate to your mission and purpose? Come on, just throw that bamboo pole out. And the extra hangers and the bead doorway divider and the broken glass vase that maybe you’ll fix someday. And the dead laptop (recycle that one.) And that weird basket with the broken handle. Even if it would be useful someday, you’ll have the joy of not having to posses it and move it and trip over it and be annoyed by it for all those years between now and that beautiful moment when you, in your dreams, discover that the basket with the broken handle is just the thing you need. So throw it out.

Some material possessions are nice. Most are encumbrances. They weigh your life down, particularly the ones gathering cobwebs in your basement. Possessions are parasites. They infect the host (you), and they persuade the host that they are part of the host… no bother at all. Just ignore me, they say, while I digest your internal organs. Pay me no mind while I infect your nervous system and cause you to climb the highest nearby point, die, burst open and spit out my spores (see “Entomophaga grylli”, commonly referred to as “summit disease, which attacks grasshoppers.) That’s what the boxes in your basement can do to you.

Objects and things thwart your mind/soul’s immune system’s ability to recognize the foreign as foreign. It is only by recognizing bits of plastic detritus and 15 year old scientific article reprints and baskets with broken handles as foreign that we can eject them. That actually requires a fairly deep level of self-understanding, in the sense of knowing who one is, and who one is not, what one cares about and where one is trying to go. Self-understanding makes it possible to see and understand that which is within us, but not part of us. Such is the spiritual path of the attic or basement cleaner.

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Said Walt Whitman: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Very well, but how large was his basement? To contain our own multitudes, it wouldn’t hurt to clear some space in the basement.

Today was basement cleaning day, and that was heavy. The cleaning I am doing involves some deep history. Boxes of papers from the 1990s… boxes of papers from the 1980s… even boxes of paper from the 1970s. Many boxes of paper. Articles from my time at UCLA in Health Services Research. Articles from my time at USC writing a doctoral dissertation on genocide. Copies of the Reed College “Quest” student magazine. Papers and memorabilia from Hollywood High School days. Boxes not opened in 30 years. Boxes containing diaries and juvenilia… aka bad teenage poetry. Boxes marked “DO NOT OPEN!” to prevent my parents from examining them while I was at college. (The seal was still unbroken, after 31 years, with a small internal thread designed to reveal opening by unauthorized persons still firmly attached to both the lid and the box!) Third grade report cards. High school debate score cards. Pretty good drawings from my 7th grade drafting class, the best class I ever took in Junior High School, but in which I only received a B from Mr. Landsman, forever discouraging me from pursuing a career as an architect. Hall passes - yes I saved hall passes. Love notes from teenage girls. Short stories from Le Conte Junior High School. A calendar from 1974. A diary kept on index cards in high school and regularly shuffled because “time has no meaning” according to me, in 1975, at age 16. And on, and on. Well most of the personal stuff I describe here will not be thrown out, yet. But the vast bulk of the material, mostly scientific and academic articles, from my dissertation and later work life was today judged ready for the dust bin of history.

Why had I held on to it this long? Inertia yes. It costs little for boxes to sit in a basement. But I also kept them because to throw away the past we have to be done with it, and I wasn’t quite done with it until now.

It seems as if there are two things that have to happen. On the one hand, we must internalize those ideas/objects so that all the parts of them that we care about are within us. “I know everything I need to know about that subject or time in my life.” On the other hand, we must externalize the ideas/objects and come to accept that we have what we need from them within, and that the ideas/objects themselves are therefore extraneous to who we are. Forgetfulness helps. Becoming a different person helps. Most of the cells in my body from that time have disappeared. I am a different person now.

Then also there is feeling of genuine closure. It’s not just the I can’t remember or don’t care. I’ve genuinely finished with those issues. What little I need is inside me, and mostly I’m done with them as living breathing concerns.

I preserve memory, in practical terms, for example, by keeping a copy of my doctoral dissertation, a few books about its subject, genocide, and a diploma somewhere. That’s enough. The boxes and boxes of articles about genocide and violence and war whose reading shaped that document between 1992 and 1994, seemed for many years like part of the project, almost like the dissertation itself. But this time, looking through them, I could only shake my head and laugh. Sometime in the last five years, a little more than a decade after receiving my doctorate, I moved from entanglement with them to a point of detachment. I observed them, even observed them with a certain fondness, but I also no longer cared about them. They were old, turning brown around the edges, and merely vague memories of a less happy time and a different person. It took over a decade to get over that period of my life, but looking at those myriad studies of genocide and violence today I just laughed and heaved them into the recycling bin with complete confidence that I was done.

When you are done with a period of your life, you are done. You just know it. Maybe it takes some of us a little longer, but is nice to know when the moment comes at last.

I’m not much of a do-it-yourself person but recently I acquired 2 large (about 8X12 feet) $10 rolls of “linoleum” at the Rebuilding Center, a knife, some glue and a few other particulars, and spent about 3 days fixing the concrete floor and laying out, cutting and gluing the linoleum. I made a lot mistakes, but now that I’m done I know to do it if there is ever a next time. My office, which looked rather dingy now seems bright and clean. Sure almost everything I used is a product of the petrochemical industry, but the whole job, paints, patch concrete, tools, came in at under $80. I’m happy.

My son is have a friend over for a sleep-over. My spouse is out of town. The father is in charge. So I declared “anything you want night” for dinner (except hard candy.) There was general applause. I offered milkshakes for dinner.

Milkshakes for dinner?!! Yes! Milkshakes for dinner! Woohoo! The chocolate chip cookie and fudge brownie shakes were followed by a chaser of cookies and cheatos and Koala Crunch Bar. Damn. Life is good. My daughter even added spaghetti and a nectarine and a bit of peach from my plate. My son even had a few strawberries that I was eating. Milkshakes for dinner! Yes!

I’ve been reading a lot of stories lately about how incredibly talented kids with fantastic records aren’t able to get into their first, second or even fourteenth choice for college. One article pointed out that too many wanted admission to Ivy League colleges that have absurdly high application rates, and low admission rates. But even allowing for that, I don’t get this obsession. Why would you want to get into a college other than one that would accept you?

Obviously kids, and their parents, have fallen into a mindset that deeply values the external validation conferred by admissions decisions. That basically tells me that they don’t know who they are, or what their own value is, independent of how external institutions rate them.

It is interesting to find out if your record enables you to go to a certain college, but it doesn’t mean much if you don’t get in. Maybe it was just bad luck, or maybe you didn’t meet their standards. But who cares? What you should be looking for is a college that wants you, and preferably one that wants you enough to give you a financial break. If you sneak into a “great college” you may well find yourself swimming with the sharks, folks who got in easily. What fun will that be? Who wouldn’t want to be at the top of their class, experiencing real challenges, but well equipped to meet them and even to offer assistance to one’s friends? In short why not be a big fish and a happy fish in the ocean you swim in?

This isn’t just true about colleges. It is true about life too. It is easier to get a job that is beyond your ability, or to get into a college that is too difficult, than you might think. What profit it a person to jump into water too deep? Sometimes you learn how to swim… but often enough you sink.

So when I think of my children, 7 and 11, and their future college careers, I care not a whit for their ability to get into a fancy college, and the last thing I care about is the rigor of their high school educations. If they succeed in high school let it be because they found something to care about in academic work. My only responsibility is to ensure that the ladder on which they can climb is there. I can’t make them climb it. And if the enthusiasms they develop lead them onto college, I hope they will attend a college that is as good as they are, and as attuned to them as they are to it.

There is nothing they need to prove by getting into a “top” college, and if things are anything like they seem to be today, I actively hope they don’t attend such an institution. After all the attitudes and habits that enable one to get into such an institution don’t reflect my values. I don’t want them to attend school with people who spent the days of their youth in test preparation classes and grubbing for grades and going to a defined program of “extra curricular” activities to make them seem like more desirable applicants. Ick. May they stay far away from that, live lives that they find meaningful, and find a college that values them, and friends who are like them.

It just can’t be healthy going to a college with people who have figured out how to get into a top college. A very few of them may legitimately be so brilliant they just walked right in. But the vast majority must, surely, have twisted their lives and studies so profoundly to pass the admission barrier that one can hardly imagine that there is much left of them as people.

When you think that from those top institutions come future corporate and national leaders, the picture gets even more depressing. There is some kind of bad joke to be made here. “Anyone capable of passing the admissions tests that lead to membership in America’s leadership class, is by definition too crazy by the time they are done to lead at all.” There may be exceptions… but I wonder how many?