I believe that I am at the apex of the amount of stuff in my life. I can imagine a “better” house, but please! No bigger. We have almost an acre, four cars, a canoe, tent trailer, lawn tractor, ladders, appliances, his mother’s crystal, the kid’s dress-ups, and beds still in the bedrooms. I cannot desire any “more” unless as an exchange.

When you become an adult you begin a journey of acquisitions. You marry, buy your first _____, have a baby, get baby stuff, have another, get a swing set, the dog, cat, fish, hamsters and all their dishes, cages, leashes, aquariums, bedding…. You get your first real job, need a suit for the interview, and a good car instead of the one that smokes and won’t always start. You get used to this pattern. It is easy to assume life will continue this way. The kids get bigger and get more stuff, you all need mountain bikes, skis, life jackets… but now you notice your parents, possibly moving our of your childhood home, giving you the lawn chairs and the croquet set, “downsizing”, having a few health problems and deciding not to ski this year or anymore. And then a child leaves home, And whether he returns for a summer or two, he really is gone and the important stuff of his begins to go and reside someplace else, too. And then another one leaves and suddenly you have too many too-often-empty bedrooms. And “the kids aren’t home much, shall we get rid of the trampoline?”

And then you notice that your body is just not excited about “another”. Another garden bed, another baby, another marathon - whatever it is, it just looks now like a lot of work!

And so begins the losing time. And your horizons are still big enough that any one thing set on a shelf doesn’t appear like a death knell, or the first snow of winter. But it does signal the end of summer.

People respond to this in different ways. If a man has power, he might try to dominate his family of grown-up children with the family business or with his money. Some folks refuse to give up any stuff. And their houses fill up with “junk” and every issue of Cattleman’s Digest since 1956, which will never be re-read, but just provides a home for spiders or nest material for the occasional mouse. Some people dump all the stuff and trade it for a different kind of acquisition—travel. They go and go, returning to their two bedroom condo for only brief periods of laundry.

(But what is it all for?)

I think the trick to it is to understand [I should have known it, Solomon said it] what is really happening: this forced shedding of the physical. It seems to me like this is the preparation for the eternal, for the things unseen. This weaning off of the material-- to be replaced by… the true, the real, the eternal, the incorruptible, hopefully, by all our true stored treasure.