We're Too Old to Need Trophies as Proof of a Life Well-Lived

Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Did you and I waste the time we were given?

Once again, the shipping boxes are piling up in my garage. The decision’s made: the house goes up for sale next spring. I’d have sold it this year but for two foot surgeries which potholed my spring and summer, so I won’t be fully healed and mobile until late August.

Meanwhile, downsizing. Again. I’ve never stopped- but this time, it’s a doozy.

For all of us who have too many emotional ties to things like Those Size Two Pants We Can’t Get Up Past Our Knees, That Baseball Trophy I Got in High School and all the stories that are Velcroed to pieces of our past, downsizing is deep personal work.

Lots of us have written about it. Lots of tips, tricks and suggestions. Right.

The problem is that there is, inevitably, a time when we come face-to-face with lies we keep telling ourselves about our future, even when the light that is our future becomes narrowed by the crushing realities of time, age and, perhaps, limited ability.

Last February I headed south to Ecuador on a fact-finding trip to determine if that’s where I need to be. Haven’t decided yet. I head back in November to do more research.

If you do move, you have to list, in ridiculous detail, every single item that goes into every single box that you pack.

I mean everything.

The amount of detail is remarkable. If you land in Guayaquil and the customs inspector picks a few boxes at random, and what you list doesn’t precisely match every single item that is in that box, they will tear apart everything.

EVERYTHING. You pay for it, too, so your $12k for a shipping container just got amped up significantly. You pay for the labor, the storage, the fines.

So you do the work. Even if I don’t move there, I’m packing as if.

There’s an added benefit to this. I’ll get to that in a sec.

Expats on Facebook have lots of advice about what to bring.

EVERYTHING, say some.
NOTHING, say others.

Considering a move like this, even if it’s somewhere else much smaller in these changing United States, requires harsh honesty. When you get past sixty and want to make a change, now you are tasked with end-of-life questions.

If you’re looking- with luck- at another twenty years, and the last few might or might not be good ones, how are you going to set that up for success?

Not only that, and this is where I am, do I REALLY want to box up every single thing I own again, and move them, especially when a good third or more of what I currently own, I haven’t used in years?

How long am I going to keep a dinner set when I eat standing up in my kitchen out of the same bowls?

How long am I going to hang on to that kayaking gear when I sold my kayak years ago?

How long am I going to hang on to certain camping equipment that I have never used and am not likely to use, ever?

How long am I going to hoard belongings bought for a life I thought I might live, but never did, and likely won’t? Like, evening gowns, cocktail dresses and the like?

How long, BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA, am I going to keep that gorgeous diaphonous Italian wedding gown that I found on sale twenty years ago when I still had hope?

One dear friend of mine used to keep a wedding dress on the back of her front door- no really- and we both found it hilarious. That said…how is this any different?

My Depression-Era parents had umpteen boxes of stuff that they were saving “ because we might need this someday.” Then they downsized thirty years’ worth of hoarding from a ranch home and big garage into an RV. What they had saved for “someday” could have fortified a small town in Kentucky.

This wonderful article addresses this very thing.

The author, a professor, tenderly explores whether or not she is a hoarder, but also coaxes opens the petals of her heart to ask questions of what her belongings said about her, her life and her journey. Her exploration of her relatives is deeply moving, such as discovering bags and bags of sugar that had been squirreled away during wartime rationing.

But there’s a deeper piece to the things we collect, especially when those items speak to our tastes, travels, our education and everything that we want to believe that we are in others’ eyes.

I love this quote:

Visitors to both my house and my university office have actually used the phrase cabinet of wonder to describe my aesthetic. One student at an end-of-year class party at my house remarked, in what I chose to take as a compliment, that being in my house was like being inside one of my poems.

This is similar to what many people have said about my home, particularly when I had multiple large, lit curios full of the items I’d collected from 47 years of traveling. Many of those items now reside in other people’s houses, but they didn’t do the work to collect them.

They didn’t live the stories. I did.

Does erasing proof of having been there lessen me? Does giving up my stuff, the trophies that I’ve collected these 72 years erase the proof, the value of my existence?

In a world where AI can fake me into any part of the world, making me look like I climbed Everest (nope) or Mt. Kenya (yep I did), can’t I just exist with manufactured “proof?” Of course.

But I did do those things. As a result, in a world chock-full of fakes, perhaps that’s one reason why they’ve taken on greater meaning. Not without cost.

How much does my attachment to these things, my identity, hinge on other’s acknowledgement of what hangs on my wall or grins at them from a shelf?

Did I collect all those things simply to prove to an utterly uncaring world that I didn’t waste the time I was given?*

Here’s how author Lisa Russ Sparr describes this:

In a first-year college psychology class, I learned about Erik Erikson’s eight stages of psychosocial development. My peers and I were in stage five, a period of adolescence characterized by a need to feel seen by and connected to others by surrounding oneself with emblems of a nascent self—significant souvenirs, nostalgic objects, mementos. I thought of my dorm room, the walls covered with photographs of my family and friends, posters of Botticelli’s Primavera and Van Gogh’s Starry Night, taped-up album covers—The Who’s Tommy, Stevie Wonder’s Superstition, David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust—all ways of externalizing some semblance of the person I hoped I was or might become.

People would walk into my house or gear room and be duly impressed. There was little that I didn’t use back then, from scuba gear to kayaks to snowshoes. But no longer. What was harder to let go of were what I collected from my travels, which decorated my new home in Eugene.

My cabinets of curiosities did indeed please me. The problem is in letting them go. Hanging on to the majority of those things continues to weigh me down, just as hanging on to twenty pairs of riding breeches that are way too small is a ridiculous conceit.

The more I hoard all those things, the bigger the house I need, the bigger the house, the more I have to work just to pay for the house, which is precisely where I am right now.

To wit: I have all kinds of original art by an Eastern European artist who immortalized my body at forty. I have ten of them. They speak to a time in my life…do I hang on to every single one?

Of course not.

An ex- of mine was an all-natural bodybuilder who won trophies. One day he came home from college to discover that his father had trashed all the proof of his hard work. I’m not sure he ever recovered.

The trophies he had left, huge gleaming gold things, took up space in his bedroom thirty years later. Glory days, long after the shine has worn off.

Sparr goes on to explore the other side of hoarding:

Of course, hoarding’s opposite extreme—a militant divestment of anything that might be perceived as unnecessary—can be just as unhealthy. That said, I have, since commencing this essay, begun to move more intentionally through my things, sorting and paring them slowly—a drawer one week, a linen closet the next. Keep one pressed red maple leaf from a beloved friend? Yes. But 30 or more, most now in leaf-meal fragments pressed between the pages of dictionary and Bible? No. Ditto envelopes addressed to my first-born in my much-missed grandmother’s handwriting—keep one, recycle the others. Perhaps years of children’s artwork can be photographed and digitized? And just maybe, with luck and time, I’ll be able to protect my grown children from having to make these kinds of choices for me.

I face these same decisions. As a person who once bought the same sweater in every color only to donate all those unworn sweaters to charity a few years later, I face the truth of my habits and now, the need to rein them in.

I suspect that the habit of purchasing all that stuff has a great deal to do with trying to fill a hole in myself, as the connection between sexual trauma and hoarding is well-established.

That said, I still get to do the work of releasing.

I have no children to burden with my habits, but I have indeed burdened myself with them over the years when I had disposable income, and reveled in collecting, as though collecting defined my value.

Here’s where the opportunity lies right now.

Last night after a long day of packing, I realized that I’d taped up box after box of riding breeches without bothering to try them on. I suspected the truth. Maybe I just didn’t want to know they were too small.

I dragged four boxes back upstairs. While my dog Mika chewed on a treat, I tried them on. The ones that made it went in one (tiny) pile, the others got draped over the bannister.

There’s a riding goods consignment store an hour from my house. I now have a big box for them, which takes a big weight off my shoulders.

Weight I don’t have to pay to move. Breeches that aren’t screaming at me that I’m a schlub because I’m no longer 118 lbs.

Of course you know as well as I do that the second you dump all that stuff you can’t wear because you’ve gained weight, you lose weight. But I digress.

There’s an outdoor equipment goods consignment store in Eugene that’s been receiving clothing and gear from me since fall of last year.

It’s stuff I don’t have to manage, pack, clean, store, or carry ever again.

And thank god for Goodwill.

I get to tell the truth about my life, much of which I do not want to have to tell. Having lost bones, body parts and partial grip due to surgeries, there are some sports I simply can no longer do for safety’s sake.

Painful as that is, moving all that proof of life, if you will, out the door where it will do good work for others frees me in unexpected ways.

It’s painful to look at gear you’ll never use again. It looks back at you like a discarded, lonely toy. Like that unused Peloton, the look is accusing and unrelenting.

Get rid of it. Of course there’s grief involved. Some of it is very, very tough. To ignore it, to put it off, is to either make our own work later in life harder, or to unduly burden those who love us. Neither is fair.

True downsizing is deep emotional work. It’s in-your-face, hard, loving labor, learning to let go of those parts of our lives that are now gone, and which no longer define us right now.

We don’t need no stinkin’ trophies to prove our lives had value.

We are the vessels of our stories. We are the ultimate teller of our own tales. We alone know if they are truth, embellished, or outright lies.

In a world where AI is now indistinguishable from reality, and horribly insecure people will make videos of themselves doing great things but only via AI, you and I know.

We know. Ultimately that is enough.

A truly full life is expressed in our gratitude, our confidence, our resilience. How we treat others, how we treat ourselves are both better proof that life has not been wasted on us.

Trophies gather dust. Lose their shine.

Let’s go live life, not collect trophies.

Let’s play.

Photo by Zulmaury Saavedra on Unsplash

*I can’t take credit for this quote. This piece of brilliance came to me from my beloved friend JC Spears whose wisdom often ends up making me look smarter.

Thanks as always to my readers and my subscribers. I know you have many choices as to how you spend your reading time. I hope to make it worth while.