Adding up?

A while ago, I went to a friend’s parent’s house to help them pack. My friend’s father had passed away, and his mother was ready to move into a more manageable house. I was there to help box and categorize 40+ years of accumulated stuff for a massive auction.

The sheer amount of inventory was mind-boggling and it wasn’t just the house. There was also a large pole barn. Filled top to bottom.

It was overwhelming. At some point, after many hours of boxing up vintage decorations and bottle collections, I took a short break and wondered out to the large garden on the 5-acre property.

As I circled the raised beds and surveyed this year’s vegetables, I noticed the presence of a persistent scrubby-looking weed everywhere.  The garden vegetables appeared to be straining against the stuff, barely holding their ground.

I bent down to get a closer look.

With a stick, I scraped away a few of the weeds and dug down into the soil a bit to see what it looked like. I tried a few other spots as well. The dirt seemed dusty, chalky, in spite of the typically sandy soil in this region and the regular rain we receive here.

By this time, my friend’s mother noticed me out there and joined me on my walk. We talked about the plant varieties she was growing and then the discussion turned to the pernicious weed issue. Apparently, this had started a few years ago and had escalated in spite of their attempts to get rid of it.

“How did you try to get rid of it?” I asked.

“Weed killer. We put it down every year but it just seemed to get worse.”

I could see that the weed killer as working on some plants…her vegetables, and anything other than this particular resistant species. Perhaps this weed was the only thing that could exist in the poor soil and the weed killer eliminated its competition.

We headed back to the house and I helped her sort through her kitchen next, stacking up more boxes for the auctioneer and hoisting the rest into a dumpster. All of that stuff, collected over a lifetime, some enjoyed, a lot forgotten. More stuff added on top. And now it was all leaving again, collected into boxes and shuffled off to be resold.

Now, no one would accuse me of being a minimalist (because hobbies) but this experience made me think about…things.

What things do we really need? Why do we add things? What are we solving for when we choose to add another item?

In the era of consumerism, adding things is normal. Bored? Buy something. Tired? Try this product. Struggling with your weight? Take this drug.

In fact, it’s the job of marketing to frame products as solutions to problems. Ad campaigns, unsurprisingly, never suggest our problem could be solved by taking things away or by truly digging down to understand the root cause.

Over the past few years of living in a small house, I have had to carefully curate the items I bring in. For one, there simply isn’t space. In spite of this, things do still find their way in and accumulate. Sometimes, like when I go on a rampage and start filling bags for our local thrift store, I will come across these random purchases and shake my head.  Into the bag they go, and out of the house.

Drilling down deeper, I know that certain things were added because I thought they might solve some problem. Yet another board game. A random toy. A pretty blouse. None of them used in the past year. So why did I buy them?

Did I add another board game because I wanted to increase our family time? Was adding a toy to my son’s collection was a way of alleviating my discomfort with the time he spends on electronics? How about the blouse? Was it just a way of dealing with my discomfort about not having as much social interaction as I might want?

In each of these situations, adding another thing didn’t actually meet a real goal. Maybe it temporarily met an emotional goal. But it didn’t solve the problem.  

What was I even solving for?

I want more connection with my family…so we could add in a walk to the park or take a bike ride.

I want non-electronic activities as alternatives for my son…so we could make cookies together or I could help him build a new project.

I want more social connections with my friends…so I can invite people over for a drink around the campfire. Wearing the clothes I already own.

Diagnosing the real problem isn’t particularly comfortable for me, but it often comes with far better solutions than adding more stuff. Digging down to the dirt, we can decide if the weed is the problem or if its pointing to something else. We can see what we need to add…or take away.

Speaking of weeds, I found a few patches of that same strange persistent plant in my own garden. I pulled it up at the roots and then, curious, dug around in the soil a bit. The earth seemed less fertile than the surrounding garden. Not seeing the weed anywhere else, it struck me. I wondered if that weed was actually diagnosing an area of poor soil, just like what I had seen in our friend’s mom’s garden. Instead of adding weed killer, I embarked on a little experiment. I added compost to that spot. 

Remarkably, I haven’t seen it since. With any luck, I might have found a real solution to that problem (fingers crossed).  And, I’m hoping that from here on out, I’ll keep questioning my “need” to add more things and ask myself if I was ever missing anything at all.