What Do We Leave Behind?

Some people seem to be the "savers" of all sorts of things from their journeys through life... while others are much more minimalistic in their approach.

Maybe your orientation also has something to do with your approach to the whole business of dying. For example, it always felt like my mother started "putting her affairs in order to die" already sometime in her 50s and then spent the next 30+ years in a rather minimalistic state of being.

But I have also had relatives who did next to nothing and filled their lives till the very end... and whose "preparations" berely even included having a will, let alone any kind of order in their worlds.

Of course, the strange thing is that such "order" (or lack thereof) can exist as a thing completely apart from whether or not they were a generally neat and tidy personality. In other words, your home might look perfect, but your affairs are a total clusterfnck.

It would be tempting to suggest that it's all a product of how selfish a person is... but there's more to it than that, I think.

These thoughts have been coming to the surface recently because I have been sorting through old boxes of stuff that have been sitting in a closet for many years... some of them even with such daunting notations as "HELL! Sort later."

If Not Now, Then When?

My father was always of the "don't put off till tomorrow what you can do today" mindset, which he (unsuccessfully) tried to pass on to me.

Unsuccessfully... in the sense that I didn't have the luxury of time he enjoyed, and thus more often than not ended up pushing things into the background because everything around me so often felt like it was on fire... and I was too busy trying to decide which fire to try to put out first to worry about such things as "having my life in order."

I could either attribute that to my general lack of ambition, or to the fact that my choice to stay true to myself has typically not overlapped with financial prosperity.

But I'm digressing...

The issue is being forced by the urgent need to move to smaller and more affordable quarters... and so, I am back to considering the question in the title of this post:

What Do We Leave Behind?

As someone who has been part of having to "clean up" after dead relatives with hoarder-ish tendencies, I immediately go to "as little as possible!"

But that's not really a good answer.

That said, we often find ourselves hanging on to multiple examples of "meaningful mementos" from our lives, when just one would do the job. In unpacking an old storage box, I don't need to hang on to my mother's entire collection of cermic birds... one will do just fine, and the other 30 can be sold on eBay... even if all I can hope to get is $15 each for items she might have paid $200 or more for.

Often, the lessons of "downsizing" boil down to answering the question of whether or not you're choosing to keep something because it is important to my life, or because it was important to someone else's life.

Whose life are you living?

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Created at 2025.07.15 02:07 PDT
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