Wednesday July 2, 2008
Mental house-cleaning
No one likes moving.
Joan and I moved five times in our first four years of marriage. The first time, we rented a one-ton truck, and had plenty of space left. By the third time, we were still doing it ourselves, but we needed a three-ton truck.
Since then, we\’ve relied on moving companies.
The last time we moved, we resolved to sort our possessions before packing. We would get rid of the unnecessary stuff, and only move the stuff we really wanted.
Ha! Moving day arrived far too soon. “Just pack everything,” we said, in despair.
They did. And there are boxes downstairs that we still haven\’t opened in 15 years here.
Susan and Jim Lindenberger lived in the same house in Vancouver for 34 years before moving. “I\’m never moving again!” she wrote. “They\’ll have to carry me out of here [her new house, that is] feet first or kicking & screaming in a strait jacket.”
Ralph Milton recommends moving every five years, whether you need to or not. “A house move,” he suggests, “is to your physical environment what a 15-day silent retreat is to the soul, a laxative is to your bowels, or one of those hot mineral-spring spas is to your body. You purge the system of all the useless and unnecessary stuff, and hopefully some of the baggage that slows you down.”
He\’s only half kidding.
No longer used
Years ago, Peter Egan wrote a column in Road & Track magazine about a friend\’s garage/workshop/sanctuary. Car fanatics, generally, hoard old auto parts the way a magnet gathers iron filings.
A few of the more systematic fanatics label their boxes: “Worn brake pads”; “Seized water pumps”; “Fried switches”; “Wires too short to use”…
But this garage, Peter noted, had boxes labelled only with dates.
“How do you know where to find things?” Peter asked.
“Easy,” replied his friend. “If I need an MGB master brake cylinder, I can remember when I last worked on it. I just go to that dated box.”
But, the friend added, if he hadn\’t opened a box in five years, he threw it out. He didn\’t even check what treasures it might contain. If its contents hadn\’t proved valuable in that time, they were now so outdated they wouldn\’t have any value in the next five years either.
Clearing our closets To receive this column regularly via e-mail, send a request to [email protected]. E-mail subscribers also get excerpts from correspondence about these columns. Please forward a copy of this column to anyone who might be interested in subscribing.
If you want to order my books, you can call 1-800-663-2775 in Canada, 1-800-328-0200 in the U.S., or order them on-line at the Wood Lake Books website.
For a lighter look at ethics, faith, and life, I recommend Ralph Milton\’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it at the Wood Lake Books home page in Ralph Milton\’s Site, or by sending a note directly to [email protected].
It\’s also worth pursuing Charlene Fairchild\’s United Online site. Another site worth visiting is David Keating\’s \”SeemslikeGod\” page.
When I read that story, I thought that it\’s too bad we can\’t do the same with our heads. If a concept, an idea, hasn\’t been useful in shaping our lives and understanding for the last five years, why should we expect it to apply in the next five?
Why do we keep cluttering up our thought processes with it?
Perhaps we need a better mental filing system. Here\’s a moral precept, not invoked since 1968. A radical principle, ignored since Vietnam. An understanding of God, placed on a shelf since kindergarten.
House moving pushes us to clear out our physical closets and storage rooms. Sometimes we need to clear our mental closets too.
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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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