Letting go of hoarding and clutter (video)

Christopher Nyerges, School of Self-Reliance; Dhr. Seven (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly

Christopher Nyerges (\nighr-gesh\) runs the School of Self-Reliance, Los Angeles

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Get on Amazon or School of Self-Reliance

School of Self-Reliance Founder Christopher Nyerges is the author of 22 books. He teaches students how to do more with less. Why? “Frugality is a fulfilling lifestyle. Some of his books are

• How to Survive Anywhere: A Guide for Urban, Suburban, Rural, and Wilderness Environments
• Extreme Simplicity: Homesteading in the City
• The Self-Sufficient Home: Going Green and Saving Money
• Urban Survival Guide: How City Dwellers Can Live Well, and Frugally, Even in Dire Times.
• See SchoolofSelf-Reliance.com (for all titles and discounts)

There was a sweep of a homeless area in Highland Park (N.E. Los Angeles, California), where they all had to move their tents and stuff. The sanitation department’s large crew filled trucks with junk and scrubbed the sidewalk. 

There's a time for spirituality at WTI (NELA)

Before their work, one could smell piles from 200 feet away.  Fifteen police officers stood by because some of the homeless campers were angry. At least a few shouted violent accusations towards the insensitive “pigs.”

When it was nearly over, I walked through the thick of it to see what stuff homeless people collect. My eyes saw a few useful objects for daily life, but mostly junk and trinkets.  My mind was spinning.

I could not help but contemplate the vast amounts of worthless material stuff so many of us accumulate.  The difference is that housed people can hide their stuff in garages, back rooms, and rental storage units.

We all accumulate these things, thinking them valuable. We cling to these objects, believing they will impart something special or that they will appreciate in value, or even gain some spiritual or esoteric worth. But it is all material stuff.

One day my simple living space will be down to the bare essentials and I'll be free!

How to Survive Anywhere

Here are a few reasons I have become a minimalist in my approach to the collection of physical stuff.

First, when I began becoming interested in survival skills, I realized the great value of storing enough food at home to get through an emergency. It might last a few weeks, even a few months. A safe food supply is not what I call hoarding.

One of my initial purchases of grain was so large that I had an entire wall in a back room full of sealed buckets. A year later I realized I rarely ate it and slowly gave away or sold most of them.

Then I considered being prepared for blackouts and other emergencies. I realized the great value of having extra clothing, blankets, manual (non-electric) tools, knives, and such things.  Yes, I was starting to collect a cache or hoard.  From there, it just went on and on.

Self-Sufficient Home: Go Green Save Money

Should we store all the wood we find so that we can light a fireplace every night for the next year?  Should we collect all the tools and lumber we find so we can build a shed or coop in our backyard without buying it from a lumber yard? Should we collect all that wood even if we’re not actually building anything? That’s how the collection of stuff starts. Anticipation.

It’s all really good useful stuff we might use in an emergency. Before we know it, we’re scouring yard sales and thrift shops, buying things at ridiculously low prices that we might use some day. Or we tell ourselves we could sell it to make extra cash. Maybe we could barter it.

But we don’t sell it, because the retail price for these objects – despite their inherent usefulness – is little more than we originally paid or what the market will bear.

I’ve now gotten to this point. I had plenty of stuff to survive the next apocalypse, but I wasn’t really using it. I had to get shed after shed after paid storage unit after paid storage unit to store all of these really good things.

Before I knew it, I was living in a space crammed full of stuff that I never actually used but which is –I had convinced myself –  very, very valuable.

It’s a big trap. In the past 20+ years, I moved a few times and carefully looked at all the very good material things I had collected. I realized that much of it was never used by me. Never. So I decided to bite the bullet and clean house. I was unwilling to move truckloads of stuff to a new place.

My criteria became, if I had not actually used the object – despite my having determined that it was “very valuable” – in the last 10 years, then I got rid of it.

Urban Survival Guide: How City Dwellers Can Live

I gave dozens of boxes of goods to a scout leader to give outdoor gear to low-income scouts. I gave a truckload of wood and bone and rock and other natural materials to Native American friends to use in the production of art projects. I made donations to the Salvation Army and Goodwill. And I filled my blue recycling bin a dozen times, and I filled the black trash containers many times as well.

Yes, I sold some things, but selling takes time, and I rarely got back what I paid, especially not when I was under a time crunch.

Oddly, I never regretted shedding my life of material baggage. I found the world still had lots of hardware stores and grocery stores and art supply stores, and that if I was actually doing and using a product, I could just go get it as needed.

And if it were really unavailable, I realized that would not be the end of the world. I could do without. I learned to be rich in the degree to which I could do without stuff. More

[To be rich? Let go. Be like the Buddha, who as a wealthy prince renounced everything. Seeing the hidden danger, why would anyone cling?]

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