George Carlin had a wonderful comedy routine about how we are all slaves to our stuff. In essence, he said, our accumulation of material confines us; if we want to be truly free, we must ditch the stuff.<\/p>\n
But I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. As I look at the accumulation of things I’ve got — books, magazines, record albums, clothes, CDs, papers, puppets, and just plain junk — I realize that this stuff doesn’t exactly belong to me. Rather it belongs to somebody I used to be.<\/p>\n
And there, my friends, is the rub. To hold onto these things is to hold onto the illusion that I am still that person — that somewhat lost person from my past — that I sometimes imagine myself to be when I look in the mirror. A young creature of foolish notions and infinite futures, a naive dreamer and follower of fancies.<\/p>\n
There are parts of me, of course, that still bear the smooth contours of that unfinished younger soul. There are times when my mind springs back to an earlier time in my life, and the years drop away as if by magic.<\/p>\n
But the truth is that this constitutes only a part of me — and not the most important and salient part. We are all an accumulation of lessons learned, of scars won in life’s sundry battles. We contain within us echoes of our younger selves, but we are not them.<\/p>\n
If by some happenstance a great calamity were to sweep aside this years long accumulation of the physical detritus of my past, I would not weep for long. For then this burden would be lifted, at least for a time — the burden of these tokens of an earlier self, sneakily encroaching upon the corners of my life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
George Carlin had a wonderful comedy routine about how we are all slaves to our stuff. In essence, he said, our accumulation of material confines us; if we want to be truly free, we must ditch the stuff. But I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. As I look at the accumulation of … Continue reading “Stuff”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10534"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10534"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10543,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10534\/revisions\/10543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}