730 things — Day 72 of 365

 Parting with one's possessions responsibly takes time and attention.

In our consumer age, there's such a problem with piles of junk, and we want to minimise our contribution to that as much as we can. 

I do think, though, that there can be a case for people who have had a problem with hoarding and accumulation just getting it out of the house. Making your home into a landfill site is not an improvement on taking it down to the council dump.

Sometimes, to reduce things to manageable proportions and get out of overwhelm, drastic action is necessary. Until new patterns of order and peace are established, escaping from the dragon's hoard requires strength and determination, and sometimes a radical approach.

But of course, as far as we can manage it, the goal is to reduce waste and accumulation, including the accumulation of junk in landfill, pushing back against the wasteful and consumer trends of our age that are endangering all the life forms of our entire planet.

So today I wanted to show you how I tried to apply a bit of imagination to moving things on and reducing accumulation.

It's my grandson's birthday, and he wanted (yet another) transformer. So that's what I got him. This is an important part of it all to me. Yes, I think we should address our relationship with plastic, and yes he has enough toys already. I know. But I don't think I should make him the subject of my experiments in minimalism. The day will come when he himself no longer wants to fill his home with mass-produced manufacture objects (I hope), and he will be able to pass on his hoard, bit by bit, to gladden another child's heart. Meanwhile his parents are on the right track — lockdown regs have sufficiently lifted that they were able to take him and his sister on the train to the Natural History Museum in London for his birthday treat. They are setting his feet on the path of experiences not things. Way to go!

But I got his transformer on eBay, new but not in the manufacture's packaging. This meant it looked a bit disappointing to receive as a gift, so I had to think about what I could do to elevate its appearance somewhat.

Thus, the first of the two items leaving my house today is a plastic box I got to store oats. I printed off the pictures advertising the transformer — which fits my oats box perfectly — and stuck them on. 

I added the blessing of my grandson's patron saint.

On the lid I added a picture of the transformer and a notice to say it was the property of my grandson (I've obscured the full name because, you know, this is the internet).

And inside it looks as if it was meant to be there — as well as creating a handy storage box for several transformers.

So that meant an end-of-line product got scooped up and not wasted, a whole set of packaging to deal with bypassed his mother whose life is full enough already, and instead of buying some form of mass-produced birthday packaging (destined in short order for the trash) he has a sturdy box that will be useful for many purposes. It also meant one more item (an oat storage facility) out of my own life. 

That's one of two items to go. The second, also a storage item that left, was this box meant for keeping CDs.

Gosh, it makes me feel old to reflect that CDs were once the great new thing — we had all those cassette tapes with our precious music on, and had to figure out how to transfer it to CD, but now my laptop doesn't even have a CD drive — everything's on memory sticks or on the internet or stored in the cloud. We live in a changing world for sure!

I parted with my CD collection in my first big de-clutter in 2012 (my 365 year, when I got rid of at least one item a day throughout the year), but I still had this box which I kept to use for other things. It was a nice box, and it's the kind of object I like to hang on to — sits neatly on a shelf, can be used for a variety of purposes. I'm not 100% sure it was sensible to get rid of it when I think about it — it would have made a good sock storage container, or to herd up bottles of vitamins or keep sewing stuff in. But I found other solutions for storing these, so the CD box went on its way. It was a good box for packing books in. Charity shops sometimes can re-use plastic bags and cardboard boxes coming in full of items to sell, but they do get overwhelmed by them at times. I reckon that if it's possible to stow the items for sale inside another item they can also sell, that minimises waste. So that's what I did.