By Farouk Gulsara
It was just another meeting to catch up. The topic that cropped up was about downsizing. One of my friends, now in her sixties, realised that her house was filled with too many things. I do not know whether she had just heard about Marie Kondo, but that was what she had been talking about all night.
It all started when she was growing up among the members of the lower heap of the food chain. Her elders told her to value everything in life. She was taught that even a small twig has its use: to pick the teeth. The compulsion to keep and not waste began.
As life improved and she began climbing the food chain, the desire to immortalise memories of the good times trickled in. Buying mementos to mark each life’s milestone became imperative. Over time, the collection became something she would be proud of.
Then the senior years trickled in, and there she was, cooped in an empty nest without her offspring, but a bungalow full of nostalgic memories and mementoes. Caring for these objects of endearment soon became a chore. They meant nothing to others. The question of what would happen to them began to play on her mind. They would become a burden that nobody would want to carry.
Slowly, she started getting rid of her belongings, a figurine here and a saree there, leaving only a bare minimum for sustenance. In the name of philanthropy, she gave some of her belongings to the needy. To her loved ones, she gave them in the name of family heirlooms. The question is whether the others showed equal enthusiasm for owning them.
Her case also reminded me of another elderly couple who would proudly show off all their awards and a precious collection of items from around the world, as they had been stationed in various parts of the world under the umbrella of the Commonwealth. Every nook of their living room held a story from their many years of wedded bliss; a token from Somalia, a gift from Delhi, a piece from Borneo, and so on.
The next time I saw her, she was a widowed wife of 80-plus with the memory of a 60+ years of married life and a house-load full of, by that time, what she viewed as a load of junk. The mementoes were just too difficult to keep up with, and she had forgotten why and where she and her husband got them in the first place. She too was trying to dispose of them with the help of her daughter through a jumble sale, who was more than glad to do it in the hope of getting more living space.
Then there was another recent situation that set me off into overdrive. One of my old friends passed away suddenly. Lying in a coffin in a complete state of bliss, my friend was without a care in the world. Outside his house compound were his three prized superbikes, which attracted more attention than the rest of his family members. Now they stood unwanted. My friend’s wife could not wait to dispose of them to the first bidder. At least my friend, being a Chinese person, would have an effigy of a motorbike made, or even a sample of his previous VW Beetle collection, for the last journey before he was cremated.
Now, after watching the latest Hollywood interpretation of Homer’s epic poem Odyssey and reaching out to educate myself on Iliad and the lessons from them, one thing is clear. The purpose of these poems is not merely to showcase the valiant battles that the great warriors of the Greek generals won nor are they about the trophies and spoils they took back or the fantastical journeys they sailed. It is all about the experience and emotion associated with those moments. The warriors live on in the memory of their feats, nothing more. Everything else decays; so do relationships. The only remaining proof of their existence, it seems, is memory and the intergenerational recital of the epics through oral traditions.
So, for us in the 21st century, we do not have to compose poems to remember our lives by. We have the luxury of being able to store them in the clouds, guarded by angels, and probably will meet the same end after our demise. This seems more prudent than cluttering our borrowed spaces with an unnecessary carbon footprint that could burden future generations and be labelled as hoarding.
.
Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy and Real Lessons from Reel Life, he writes regularly in his blog, Rifle Range Boy.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Click here to access Wild Winds: The Borderless Anthology of Poems
Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles
