The Ghosts Under the Stairs
At a rough estimate I’d say I’m ticking over into the mid twenties in terms of the number of times I’ve moved house in my life. I’m pretty good at it, although it’s never something I’m in a rush to do. It just tends to happen.
I am a person who likes stuff, which makes moving something of an operation. A lot of sorting out has to happen to condense a life into whatever sized receptacle it’s being poured into next.
I have a complicated relationship with stuff. Some people describe me as a hoarder, but that is one thing I most definitely am not. Hoarding is an illness in which people hold onto and buy things for complex emotional reasons. If left unchecked, hoarding becomes an isolating prison that makes a person’s life small and unhappy.
I buy things for complex emotional reasons, but that’s where the similarity ends. I take joy in the things I buy and when I no longer find them joyful, I let them go again. The things I own are part of the warp and weft of a life well lived. I believe that things should enhance your life, not be your life. I am 100% in the William Morris camp of:
‘Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.’
For myself, I would like most of all to have the things I know to be useful be beautiful too, but that’s a lot harder to do.
I was thinking about this today as I plunged headfirst into the kitchen cupboards, sorting out lots of bland, but extremely useful things. Staring at dreary cookware decided me that the next time funds allow, I will be investing in a ceramic colander instead of the dull, grey metal one currently lurking in the cupboard. For me it is important to make the things you use every day as pleasurable to own as possible, if you can. Don’t invest in once in a lifetime, invest in the everyday, where things pay you back a thousandfold.
Most of the tricky corners of the house where strange and troubling detritus collects have been conquered in previous weeks, but this afternoon I began the worst place of all - the cupboard under the stairs. We are lucky in that we have a cupboard under the stairs, and it is sizeable. We are unlucky for all the same reasons. I am good at keeping tabs on things in my eyeline, less so when I can slam a door on stuff.
The cupboard under the stairs became the last refuge of everything nobody really wanted anymore but wasn’t sure they were quite done with. Excavating it was an exercise in meeting ghosts; the teenage boy who was going to become a graffiti artist, the man who thought he might enjoy a more tweed based lifestyle, the Brexit emergency tins - just in case, the woman who decided yoga might make her less mad. It all came tumbling out. None of it fits anymore, me or anyone else who lives here.
Those are the lives we didn’t choose. We have millions of them in our single span, but it’s only really when we move house that we get so up close and personal with some of them. Some are harder to let go of than others. I am sad that I am a terrible gardener and slightly appalled at how liberating I am finding the idea of not having to weed a border. I am sad that I am not lithe and calm and bendy and committed to yoga like I thought I would be by now. I like the person I become when I do yoga but not enough to actually do yoga.
I cannot tell you how much I miss the boy who was going to be the next Banksy.
What I do know, when I am calm enough to listen to myself, is that other things are coming, other lives to be lived in this one and this. Some will be terrible, some will be beautiful. Some will be both.
There is no cupboard under the stairs on a boat. Life will be different. Lives will be different. Things will be more open, because they have to be. There is no room for ghosts where I’m going, only life, well lived - beautiful and useful.