On the things I leave
I have things that belong to me, yet they remain at a distance. Far away from me. Already obtained yet unobtainable at the same time. An ocean away, if you will.
I've learned to live with less things, not out of a trend for minimalism but out of need. Moving often makes you evaluate what you really want to go through the trouble of keeping and taking with you. And it brings into focus just how much things can drain you and drag you.
Where do you keep your things? Why do you get them if youre gonna keep them somewhere else? Are they safe? Are they getting damaged while you don’t use them?
What’s the point of keeping them while they are far away if the day you go back to them they will have spoiled; exhibiting the wear and tear of merely being physical objects in the world. Showing their age, and the way fungi have crept inside them, eating them from within. Or how sun exposure has burnt the color away from them.
I'm frustrated, though. I'm pierced by two conflicting forces; the urge to let go and live lighter and the desire to engage with things that call my interest. And this confronts me with a nonsensical contradiction. I want to get that new book that I’m interested in, I want to buy that new Warhammer kit to play Kill team, I want to back that Kickstarter for a boardgame that looks really cool. But at the same time, I'm constantly thinking "how am I gonna get all of this back to Perú".
To Perú? Why to Perú?
Because that’s my homebase, of course. Eventually I’m going back there and all my things will be there.
Is it? Am I?
On the one hand, it sucks to get new things that I then leave "back home" to not use because theres no space where I currently live and its annoying to be dragging around so many things that I’m not actively using, so I have to be selective about which is the book I'm keeping around cos I’m actually gonna read now, and not "maybe I want to consult it in a few months".
On the other, what if I don’t actually go back home? What if Perú is not my homebase anymore. What if I’m just becoming a nomad and what I have is what I take with me. What’s the point of buying things that don't fit that lifestyle. And what’s the point of sending things to Perú if my actual life is elsewhere. If after this current arrangement I don't move back to Perú but to somewhere else within Spain, or Europe, then the things that I bought to use down the line would have to be returned to Europe.
I’m thinking about just having a book collection for my research, for example. Yes I have countless PDFs and ebooks but I enjoy having physical copies of the book and rifling through them on a free afternoon to find something inspiring, and that’s something I don't feel I can have now.
But there's also no point in sending things back to a "home base" I merely visit nowadays, but don't spend any time to build a work routine in. If I’m only visiting for 2 weeks, I’m not gonna start reading the rules for a TTRPGs that I’m not gonna run there in that time and I wont take with me because its not the game I’m running and I don’t want it to take up space. So I just never use it. And I have it there for nothing.
And I can't allow myself to make more space where I live because it all feels so temporary, transitory, it is not where I’m setting root and I don’t want to start building a huge board-game-and-book-shelf when that will just become a huge complication I need to deal with.
At the core, this question about things is really a question about my creeping feeling of a lost sense of home. I am tired of the transitoriness, but I also have no idea where I'm gonna end up, or where I want to start to build something. But that’s a topic for another time.