Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
I had forgotten where I had packed the key to the lock for safekeeping. That fact was not a surprise. The house was chaotic from the move with boxes overflowing with random combinations of things that didn’t make any sense – bedroom pillows (still in sleep stained pillow slips) packed with kitchen saucepans, cutlery flowing freely inside the cat litter tray (clean-ish, cat deceased), my best dress (silk, on sale from Boss, summer 2014) bleakly visible beneath a Bunnings plastic container of bicycle parts (orderly, important man things).
Despair surfaced. Mixed with just a bit of anger. I had packed as much as I could before I left for my international business trip, leaving a sometimes disciplined, sometimes wildly disorganized adult (male) and a deeply uninterested teenager (male) to complete the packing and complete the move. I was now casting my weary eyes over the results of that fractious collaboration. To shake off the desire to rage and to put the “potential damage to possessions” into perspective, I mumbled weakly and without significant intent my mantras 1. “people are more important than things” and 2. “Kind thoughts, kind words, kind actions”. I repeated them 3 times and as there was no one to actually rage at in any case, I turned my attention back to the key. I had one hour to find the key. One hour to develop a search strategy and then to deliver a positive outcome.
I decided to sit and recount my steps from the beginning of the day of packing, to visualize it, to find it in my mind and then to find its real shiny silver self. I made and carried by tea to the balcony. As I sat with a sigh I thought about the weight of my stuff spilling out in all directions in the room behind me. The Japanese have a saying that spareness is beauty. Certainly the move had given me a heavy heart. “so much stuff”. “SO MUCH STUFF” My life was not spare. My life held beauty yet I was now convinced that it could be so much more with fewer things: things like my cat’s ashes (sadness held in a little bottle), my self help books post divorce (10 or more of them – surely the one that made the suggestion to name a cockroach after your ex was all I needed?), too many childrens drawings and tiny shoes. Anchors, memories, making the inside of my head scratchy with nowhere for them to be stored out of the way.
I finished my tea and returned to the fortress of boxes to scratch like the bush turkey outside the back door through the mound of my life’s possessions. I put on music, suddenly saw in my mind exactly where the shiny prize lay, quietly, taped to the back of the drawer in my bedside table.
Relief. I could now unlock my physical most important document box of possessions. Could I now move to unlocking my life, shedding all those things that no longer served me well, no longer made my life beautiful?