I finally became so fed up with the amount of junk lying around my house that last week, I arranged for a 15 cubic foot dumpster on SUV wheels to be delivered to my house. This past Saturday I hauled hundreds of pounds of useless junk up my basement stairs and threw it into this dumpster. Dozens of molding boxes, broken picture frames, wire frame shoe racks, trinkets, mementos and faded snapshots from our past were raised from the dead and banished to the netherworld of a private landfill in central Ohio. Finally, after seven hours of lifting and hauling load after load of shit, the basement had been exorcised and the dumpster was full the brim.

Sunday afternoon, I stood looking out of my bedroom window which looks down on the driveway where the dumpster sat. I could see the large section of the G.I. Joe aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Flag and two other large ships. I could see dozens of VHS tapes which once sat trophy on my shelves in the age before DVDs. I could see infant toys which my children have already outgrown. There were stuffed animals that my wife had owned her entire life. These were things from our past. These things once defined us in some way.

I don’t know–maybe being an only child, I placed an odd value on my possessions. I tend to view the things I own as an extension of myself, as a footnote to the definition of me and not having brothers or sisters to play with as a young boy; I tended to anthropomorphize my possessions and project human emotions and needs on them. So, I was a bit melancholy looking down on the relics of my past sitting in that dumpster and then I remembered something I read once where an audience member asked Krishnamurti What makes us fear death? He said:

Do you think a leaf that falls to the ground is afraid of death? Do you think a bird lives in fear of dying? It meets death when death comes; but it is not concerned about death, it is much too occupied with living, with catching insects, building a nest, singing a song, flying for the very joy of flying. Have you ever watched birds soaring high up in the air without a beat of their wings, being carried along by the wind? How endlessly they seem to enjoy themselves! They are not concerned about death. If death comes, it is all right, they are finished. There is no concern about what is going to happen; they are living from moment to moment, are they not? It is we human beings who are always concerned about death–because we are not living. That is the trouble: we are dying, we are not living. The old people are near the grave, and the young ones are not far behind.

You see, there is this preoccupation with death because we are afraid to lose the known, the things that we have gathered. We are afraid to lose a wife or husband, a child or a friend; we are afraid to lose what we have learnt, accumulated. If we could carry over all the things that we have gathered–our friends, our possessions, our virtues, our character–then we would not be afraid of death, would we? This is why we invent theories about death and the hereafter. But the fact is that death is an ending, and most of us are unwilling to face this fact. We don’t want to leave the known; so it is our clinging to the known that creates fear in us, not the unknown. The unknown cannot be perceived by the known. But the mind, being made up of the known, says, “I am going to end,” and therefore it is frightened.

Now, if you can live from moment to moment and not be concerned about the future, if you can live without the thought of tomorrow–which does not mean the superficiality of merely being occupied with today; if, being aware of the whole process of the known, you can relinquish the known, let it go completely, then you will find that an astonishing thing takes place. Try it for a day–put aside everything you know, forget it, and just see what happens. Don’t carry over your worries from day to day, from hour to hour, from moment to moment; let them all go, and you will see that out of this freedom there comes an extraordinary life that includes both living and dying. Death is only the ending of something, and in that very dying there is a renewing.

So I chose today to stop carrying over the things of the past, to test and see if it didn’t free me up psychologically and spiritually. I have heard it said that often the things we own end up owning us and I believe that to be true. What is underneath the double sum line when we check out of this world? Is it the dollars we have left which we traded our time, energy, and ambition for while we were alive? Is it the trinkets we bequeath to our children, mementos which are supposed to hold our spirits like Lord Voldemort’s horcruxes? Is it the pile of words we leave in ink stained notebooks and diaries or filling up Megabytes on some web server in a dusty room somewhere?

The only possession we truly have is our action in the moment–right now. Regrets from the past, desires both fulfilled and wanting, memories of joy and pain–all these things are ruptured holes in the spaces and times of our minds, mental knots in the muscles of memory which compose our identities and fill the molds of the masks we wear to each other’s costume parties each day.

So, I let my trash go willingly but my trash wasn’t so willing to let me go. About 9:30 Sunday night, I was watching John from Cincinnati on HBO and heard the rumble of thunder. I looked out the window but the night sky was clear and I could see stars without a fog of cloud. I went to the front window to see if any inclement weather was rolling in from the East. I stood, mouth open, looking at my rental dumpster filled with hundreds of pounds of my trash, sitting in the middle of my residential street. The son of a bitch had broken free of its moorings (two pitiful clay bricks) and rolled right down my driveway into the god damned street. What the fuck was I gonna do? Two cars had already tried to come down the street and had to turn around and go the other way, one of the drivers sped off red faced and glaring at me like I was a criminal.

They say at times of immediate stress, human beings are capable of marshaling great strength to save a loved one from being crushed by a car or some other ridiculous situation. Apparently, I had one last act of heroism in me for the trash which had defined me for so long. I was able to push this half-ton dumpster five feet or so back to the crest of my driveway which allowed enough space for a car to drive by. I called the dumpster company and the owner graciously agreed to leave the comfort of his home, get his truck, and come to pick up the dumpster that night.

So the story has a happy ending. My trash got hauled. My basement is breathing a sigh of relief. I got to watch both John from Cincinnati and Entourage and still made it to bed by midnight. And I learned a valuable lesson about attachment to things and letting them define us as individuals rather than letting our actions in the moment speak the definition of our hearts.

I recommend that everyone undertake an enema similar to this.

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