The Exhaustion of Stuff™

getting pitchy for all the right reasons

Ben and I moved thirteen times within our first fifteen years of our marriage. It’s not that we are vagabonds or gypsies (well, not entirely). There have been perfectly legitimate, grown-up reasons for why we remained mobile: new jobs, flipping houses, a career that required on-campus living. But nonetheless, we moved almost yearly and became pretty adept at packing.

It wasn’t until we moved into our current home that Stuff™ really began to multiply. The nice thing about being mobile is that you learn to travel light, but one year in our house turned into two that turned into three and now, here we are, going on six years in a single home.

Since January, I’ve walked around our home looking for small corners of respite. I was in the middle of book writing, so I didn’t have a lot of extra time to deep clean (or clean at all). School papers and sweaty socks and stuffed animals were occasionally stacked but never cleaned with a capital C. We’ll not discuss the bathrooms.

Capacity-wise, I knew I was making the right choice to let the Stuff™ just be. Any extra relational, emotional, or time currency was spent on my family rather than on tidying the home. But even so, the piles mounted, and along with them, I could feel the tension rising in my shoulders.

My home is often a physical manifestation of what’s happening internally, but more and more, I am finding the reverse can also be true. Surroundings can affect the soul.

In Atomic Habits, James Clear notes that our environments impact how we live our lives, the way in which we go about our days and build healthy rhythms. We are not unaffected by the places we live and the Stuff™ that takes up space on bookshelves and in closets. He writes,

“Stop thinking about your environment as filled with objects. Start thinking about it as filled with relationships. Think in terms of how you interact with the spaces around you.”

A home is more than a place to put our things. A home shapes us. It is where we are formed in relationship and, in an ideal setting, feel safe and supported. But when the Stuff™ that surrounds us is excessive or lacks meaning or breeds chaos, those same qualities begin to manifest themselves within us. The relationship with home becomes unsettled.

Margareta Magnusson calls it “the exhaustion of stuff.” As a Swedish death cleaner (yes, you read that right), Magnusson knows what she’s talking about. She has walked many people through the process of holding on and letting go. She has seen over and over how volume can weigh down a person, how a lifetime’s worth of knick-knacks and Amazon boxes and fourteen different versions of the same sweater can result in mental, emotional, and physical overwhelm. 

Surveying my home over the last month or so, I have felt it. I have felt the weariness brought on by too many things or trying to tend all the things or putting away things in one room only to have the basement explode when you weren’t looking. I may not be death cleaning in the traditional, end-of-life sense, but I have felt the exhaustion. Deeply.

Enter: Pitchy Sarah.

Ben gave me this nickname many years ago, because when stress builds, I have a tendency to begin throwing things away. I get “pitchy.” If it’s not tied down or clearly a favorite toy or you haven’t worn it in a month, you better hide it or it’s gone. (Yes, tears have been shed. I am not proud.)

But it wasn’t until this latest season of pitchiness that I began to realize why dropping boxes off at the Franciscan thrift felt so darn good. I was depleted (in part by the Stuff™) and clearing out armloads gave me a tangible way not only to clear out clutter but also to remove the cobwebs that had accumulated in my soul.

As Margareta Magnusson writes, “Living smaller is a relief.” And with every box or brown paper bag that made its way out the front door, I felt it. Room to breathe.

It makes me think a little about Jesus’ admonition to his disciples to carry no more than what they were wearing: 

​​“Take nothing for the road,” he told them, “no staff, no traveling bag, no bread, no money; and don’t take an extra shirt.” (Luke 9:3 CSB)

And I don’t want to stretch a point here to make a point or to take things out of context. Yet, I cannot help but think that Jesus knew how easily the disciples (like us) can depend on our things.  How easily we fill our bags with Stuff™ until good things like one extra shirt become a cheap substitute for his abundance. The Stuff™ turns on us.

Please hear this: Physical objects can be sacred vessels of divine goodness and beauty. I believe that wholeheartedly. I think it’s why we are drawn to pieces of art or keep movie ticket stubs from first dates. Things often become containers of deep meaning. But when the Stuff™ we consume begins to consume us, something shifts. One extra shirt is no longer just “good sense” or “just in case” or “they also had it in blue!” but a subtle accumulation of more that lacks meaning and drains the soul.

PHEW. I feel it. (Do you?) And I want to do more than get pitchy for a season. I want, as Wendell Berry writes, to “Think Little.” I want a smaller life with fewer things and less to manage and maintain. I want good relationships with the people and the things in my home, so that home is not just a place to put my Stuff ™ but a place of welcome.

This shift in thinking is not about achieving some new level of domestic prowess. (It’s unlikely I will consistently maintain a truly clean home anytime soon. I’m just not good at it.) Rather, it is about re-establishing my relationship with the physicality of my home and ridding myself from the exhaustion of Stuff™ as a way to untangle the soul. It is a resistance to the lure of more as well as a hope-laced leaning into a God who turns water into wine and a few fish into a feast. It is trading a posture of consumerism for that of creation, knowing that God needs nothing more than dirt to breathe life into a human.

I know this journey will not be simple. My hunch is that culling down the clutter to embrace a little life will take an entire life. But what I want for myself (and for you) is not a black-and-white rule to follow, a clear line between less and more, but an attentiveness to the Spirit within us and to the ways we are being formed by the Stuff™ around us. In every season, may we take time to consider the relationships we have with our things, to ask whether they’re leading us toward exhaustion or to embrace and extend the deep and abiding Love of a good and abundant God.

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