It might be in your garage, or under the bed in the spare room, or at the back of your cupboard. But it’s there. And it’s growing.
You didn’t notice it at first, because that’s how planets roll. They start as specks of dust or ice, just floating around, not bothering anyone. But all objects that have mass have a gravitational pull, and so those specks start trapping even smaller bits of dust or ice in their gravity field.
Soon, what was a pinhead-sized cluster of debris has grown into a chunk of rock the size of a car. Then a house. Then a stadium. By the time it’s the size of an island, space pebbles are thwacking into it from all sides like groupies flinging themselves at a star.
The only difference between those planets and the one in your home is that yours isn’t a sphere. It’s a cube. And it’s made of cardboard. Perhaps that’s why you don’t realise it’s a planet. To you, it’s a box full of bits of paper. But trust me, it’s a planet. And it needs to be destroyed before it sucks you in completely and crushes you with its ever-growing mass.
My planet started innocently enough. In fact, it started because I was trying to be efficient and proactive. That’s why I went out and bought The Box. I wanted a nice, neat place to store important documents I would need later. Contracts. Certificates. SARS forms. It made sense. For a while.
At first, it was clear. There were things I needed to keep. There were things I didn’t need to keep. But the problem with The Box is that it starts exerting its gravitational pull on you. It makes you wonder about a third category of things: those which are important for a while, but which you know you’ll dump one day. Those things you think you should keep.
The moment I added “should” to the box, I was doomed. That’s because “should” doesn’t have limits. It expands infinitely according to whatever noises are in your head at that moment.
A birthday card from my sister from when I was 22? I should probably keep that, because, you know, one day she’ll be dead and I might feel bad if I tossed it. How about the pamphlet from the nature reserve where you spent a great weekend last year? Well, it’s very informative and you had a good time, so you should probably add it to the pile. Before long, I’m putting this morning’s Pick n Pay slip into The Box because I bought a bottle of milk and the milk might go off and I might need a refund or something.
The Box, this rogue planet, is growing exponentially. Every pointless piece of paper you add to it attracts two more. It starts to crush you with its weight: the weight of “should”, of dragging along an ever-growing mass of clutter. The room where it lives has become a place you avoid, except in those moments when you dump the latest sheaf of Shoulds into it.
My Box was out of control. There were business cards from a contractor who had gone bankrupt 2010. There was a screenplay I’d written in 2008. They’d made the movie, but I thought I should keep the screenplay in case…they ever wanted to make it again? There was a small label with a Christmas tree on the front and “For Tom” on the back, in a handwriting I couldn’t identify but which I thought might have belonged to a family friend I never liked.
In case you’re wondering, I’m not a hoarder, at least not in the clinical sense. Hoarding is an awful disorder that can put terrible strain on the hoarder and their families. But while my Box wasn’t a symptom of a disorder, I have realised at last that it is definitely linked to deep-rooted anxieties.
I had filled it with paper, believing that I was constructing an efficient system. I convinced myself that I was building towards something. But The Box wasn’t a system. It was just a place to store all my worries about not having a system, my anxieties about getting derailed and losing my way in a noisy, complex world. Instead of creating order from chaos, I had convinced myself that chaos was order.
As it turned out, I was building towards something: the two realisations I needed to understand that even planets can be destroyed.
The first – that The Box wasn’t what I had thought it was – I’ve already mentioned. The second was much more powerful. It was, simply, that I could throw away everything in The Box and nothing bad would happen. Even more miraculous, all sorts of good things would happen. Freedom. Clarity. Calm. Something like the start of a real system. Best of all, the knowledge that I have the power to obliterate years of immobility and chaos with a single decision.
Sure, I’ve probably kept more than I should have. I have no doubt that the space debris is already drifting towards me. But, when it starts to look a little too much like a ball of rock, I know all I have to do is ditch it. And when I do, I’ll be floating free again.
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