The burden of things

It is refit time aboard Tranquility and things can get messy.

The already meager living space is occupied by lumber, sheets of bendy foam, painting products, stowed mainsail, furling jib and staysail, parts waiting for repair, extra supplies for the long term stay in the boatyard and many assorted items that has not yet received an approval for discarding nor a destination of use. Normality, if such a condition existed, is gone.

We congratulated ourselves when we originally moved aboard after downsizing of most of our belongings, but we feel like the process is never ending. Over time we acquired more stuff, hardly disposing of any decrepit or unimportant object, we collected trinkets and memorabilia, hoarded parts and materials that floated our way, in few cases not figuratively. All this lays above the regular household items, clothing to survive the four seasons and the always useful boat gear, composed of an arcane list of safety gear, aids to navigation and fun toys.

This collection moves around on the surfaces of the boat when we are pursuing a specific object, like sandbars in an estuary. There, where the tide meets the stream, stuff gets shuffled continuously to the point of requiring periodical management, raking and repacking. There has been several attempts in compiling maps and indexes of this less than a 150sq ft of interior space, all kept at bay by the revolutionary forces of Change, that always challenge the established order.

 

To date, despite the best intentions, no ultimate map exists, although we never lost faith that one day we would have a more or less accurate blueprint of the storage onboard.

I have always desired to possess some of the useful skills that obsessive compulsive people are champions at, but instead I grew up with NGDD, also called Not Giving a Damn Disorder which makes my cleaning efforts look rather pathetical and confused. This is also probably why it’s going to take a weekend to deeply clean and reorganize a 29 ft boat, another punch in the stomach to my productivity and self worth.

Kate’s traveling to Panama City and I am taking advantage of one less body on the boat to explode the interior and hopefully repack it in a way that makes sense. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last. It is indeed due, so my bruised ego has to shut up and roll with it.

Many parts and specific tools which use has been postponed for long become now essential to complete the task at hand. Excavation begins, tote bags aggregating protective ziplock bags filled with objects sorted by some thematic criteria spread around like a slow and unstoppable honey spill.

Putting them back in the same way they came out seems totally out of my grasp. The more difficult to reach the object the more anxiety and adrenaline fog my reasoning, bringing confusion and shock to my procedural memory already impaired by NGDD and making less likely for the pieces to go back in the same rational order.

I do it one step at the time, inefficiently, but without stopping.

I guess this is the curse of modern life: acquiring things that we may or may not use that then become a permanent claustrophobic presence, because, you know, you’ll never know…

There is great hype about topics such decluttering, simple living, minimalism, downsizing. It may be an alert, that speaks to the worst side of the consumerist mentality, or viral talk targeted to who has the time and money to deal with the problem.

The need to acquire stuff is a familiar yet still deceiving part of us, which has been engraved in our brains through indiscriminate, pervasive and undisclosed psychological manipulation techniques for more than a 100 years, since Edward L. Bernays adopted his uncle’s (Sigmud Freud) discoveries to serve the wealthy and powerful.

Appealing in a veiled way to human irrational drives like sexuality, fear, vanity, insecurities, selfishness, Bernays invented Propaganda and its good face in society, the industry of Public Relations.

We’ve been studied and manipulated for so many years that it’s not surprising how resisting the call of consumerism seem an hopeless battle. This conditioning survives even when you remove many of the advertisement sources sailing away on a small boat.

Grown up measuring our worth by the objects we purchase, we still fall for the idea that if we do not buy things we are worthless. Not only that, if we don’t buy things then the economy suffers and consequently jobs, and the large scale system we are embedded in.

So apparently we are between a rock and a hard place.

Tranquility is helpful in the quest to escape the one-dimensional man trap. With the finite and scarce space available we have to make choices, pick the important. Every subtraction is difficult, every addition must be purposeful. It’s a lot to ask to a brain used to pick from brimming shelves, using irrational hunches that expose us to the work of the engineers of attention.

Mankind have long believed that material objects contain spirits, possess some kind of supernatural quality that speaks to us, to the point that we can have a relationship with them, a conversation, intense staring and appreciation. Some objects truly give us joy.

In Japan there is a ceremony known as the Festival of Broken Needles (Hari-Kuyō) where women commemorate their worn-out needles and pins and bury them. Irrational but powerful forces bond us to objects and despite people profiting from this intimate relationship we can still choose the meaningful and useful over the superfluous. Which is easier said than done.

But let’s focus for one second here. I know this in front of me is a collection of bad decisions. My bad.

I can still donate it, recycle it, or toss it. Will you?