STUFF!

After a long and extraordinary process, I have finally received the five boxes of personal items I packed and shipped from Florida in January. My closet overfloweth. Frankly, I don't have sufficient room for everything now, largely because I only have shelves, no space for hanging things like coats and dresses.

Then, in my wandering across the interwebs, I stumbled on this admonition:

"Stop buying unnecessary things.
Toss half your stuff, learn contentedness.
Reduce half again.
List 4 essential things in your life,
stop doing non-essential things.
Do these essentials first each day, clear distractions,
focus on each moment.
Let go of attachment to doing, having more.
Fall in love with less."

I choose the word admonition judiciously. It comes from the Latin "ad" (towards) plus "movere" (to move). Generally admonishment connotes a sort of verbal punishment, a result and reaction after bad behavior as in, "I admonished Fido for peeing on the rug," or, "Dad admonished me for failing my chemistry test." As I considered the perfect noun for this little web-based poem, I realized that it is not meant as indictment but instead as motivation to move towards something.

"Move towards" reduction of these material constructs. " Move towards" clarity and purpose. "Move towards" simplicity.

Now, I'm not much of an ascetic, and am not about to renounce my worldly possessions, but there's something to be said for the freedom and clarity that derives from having little. If you can pack everything that matters into a bag, you can go anywhere you please. For several years now, I've denied myself the comfort of home and familiarity, actively replacing that stasis with travel and new horizons. I've been unfettered and unattached as possible. I've consciously sought to collect a life in the form of experience rather than things, and I've been deliberately unemotional about leaving behind places and people over and over again. Frankly, it's incredible, even depressing, to me that living this way I've still managed to accumulate so much stuff, mostly clothing. It's even more frustrating to know how upset I was at the long delay in its arrival. I like to think I was just desperate to get warm clothing for the winter.

Maybe what this admonishment is driving me to move towards is a different awareness of what exactly I'm collecting. With less material items, the mind focuses more acutely on more ethereal spoils of the road: friends, education, collected tidbits of wisdom, sunsets that cannot be photographed. Of course these things have long been my goals, but how often do I really focus on them? How often have I lost a moment by thinking ahead to the next one? I could slow down, I suppose... stay awhile.

And I won't run off to the Salvation Army with my boxes tomorrow. I'm so grateful to have a diverse selection of t-shirts and warmer winter clothes that I have been spending the last couple days dumbly smiling at the closet. But let's be realistic: I'd do just fine and dandy with half of all this. Or less. It is, in the end, just stuff.

Bureaucracy

It's that time! Taxes! Not for me, of course, but for my personal secretary, accountant, navigator, and psychiatrist, my mother. What a great mom to handle the affairs of her child abroad. In the process of sorting out the patchwork of my employment history so she could file my taxes, she emailed to ask what interest I earned from my bank accounts in the past few months.

Interesting question (pun!!). Here's what I learned:

My checking account is not interest bearing.
On my savings account I earned a whopping:
$1.08 in December
$0.98 in January
$0.71 in February
and.... wait for it...
$0.40 in March

The only thing more excruciating than having zero assets is having a bank statement silently taunt me over the fact I have zero assets. Forty cents? I think that bought me a bus ticket back when I was using my second grade student discount.

Also on today's highlight reel was a trip to Australian Customs and Quarantine. These are not, as logic might dictate, contiguous offices. They are located 15 kms away from each other in very different parts of town. Thus set up to ensure that new migrants wanting to retrieve their long awaited sea freight have no bloody chance of sorting out paperwork in a timely fashion. I was among the fortunate. Being white, I promptly got shuffled to the right desks and offices. I was not, like some of my compatriots in the struggle, sent away to "fill these forms out right. IN ENGLISH, you understand??" My sea waybill and Unaccompanied Personal Effects documents (UPEs in customs slang) were stamped with relative alacrity.

The lovely Quarantine officer who assisted me looked over the papers and glanced at my declared packing list. "Fine, all fine," she said. "There should be no problem with any of this. You're importing a bicycle? Did you use it to ride in wooded areas or farmlands?"
"No, it's a roadbike. The only time it got close to anything wild was when I took a detour and ended up in East Cleveland."
(I didn't add that last part... she wouldn't have understood the joke. They profess ethnic sensitivity in this part of the world.)

She nodded on, "Yes, this should all check out just fine. We'll just send two officers over to inspect the goods when they arrive. Should be very quick and easy, no problem."

Me: "Great, so I'll just call and set up an appointment when I know the shipment is here?"

Her: "Yes, and so we'll just need to charge you $170 for that."

Me: "Um..."

Her: "The Australian Quarantine Authority is a cost-recovery organization. We charge importers for our services."

Importer? Services? The service of showing up at a warehouse in Port Adelaide and watching me unpack my clothes and bed linens. If I pay extra will they have a doggy come along to sniff my underwear? And, let's be real here... I am not an importer. I am a very naive student from the US who foolishly thought it made more sense to ship over the copious clothes I already own than to buy a new wardrobe for 1.5 years of grad school. Silly, under-informed me.

The woman was almost apologetic. "Australia is pretty strict with importation," she said. "I'm sure when you send your belongings back to America it won't be such a trouble."

Oh no, lady, in America, we have plenty of our own bureaucracies to pay off. I almost said that out loud. It occurred to me as I was opening my mouth that she might not appreciate that line of humor either. I would have been backpedaling like mad to compliment her pleated khakis or government-issue abstract-kangaroo-pattered scarf/tie thingy. "Florescent lighting does marvels for your skin tone!"

I'm a little proud at myself for biting my tongue. For realizing I needed to bite my tongue. Maturity does bring some benefits. Less discretion, and my skivvies may have found themselves in indefinite, solitary-silence-treatment quarantine. With a salaried guard dog.