Belongings

When I get off of the subway at the end of the line, the conductor (or an automated facsimile thereof) admonishes me, "Don't forget your belongings." I find this reminder interesting. Are people more likely to forget their belongings when they get off at the last stop? It's possible; I suppose I fall into a kind of stupor knowing that I don't need to worry about missing my stop, so maybe I am more prone to absent-mindedness in this situation than if I actually had to pay attention to where I was getting off.

But that's not really what the automated conductor facsimile is talking about, is it? No. "Don't forget your belongings" is a nice euphemism for "pick up your crap!" The voice is telling me to pick up the newspaper, coffee cup, etc., that I have brought onto the train with me. (I probably don't even think of these things as belongings. They don't belong to me. They were just a temporary means of holding my beverage, or filling my time.) Again, I point out the inconsistency: Are people more likely to leave their trash when getting off at the last stop? Alternately, is the anti-littering message somehow more effective at a terminus? Does the fact that the train is stopped there for more than a second make it more likely that a passenger will look around and realize that she did leave some trash behind, or even take a moment to pick up something left by another careless subway rider?

Regardless of whether the reminder works or not, it got me thinking about the word "belongings." Over the last year, I have been trying to "declutter" my life, with varying degrees of success. I have learned that the inverse of the old saying is also true: My treasure is someone else's trash. It even goes beyond that: over time, something that was once my treasure becomes my own trash, like the exciting new lipstick I have decided I don't like the color of, but it's practically unused, so I feel guilty throwing it away, and it's now adding to the clutter on my dresser. (I thought a lipstick example was only appropriate, given the theme of the blog.)

Even if my desk has three projects-in-progress cluttering its surface, or baskets of clean laundry litter the bedroom because I can't fit them all in my closet, I have become more careful about the belongings I acquire, and have started to think about whether they are better than something I already have, whether they are worth the X hours of work that I spent making the money I will exchange for them, and how likely I am to see them as junk in a month, or a year, or a decade, much the way the coffee cup or the newspaper becomes, a half hour after I acquire it, something I no longer think of as belonging to me.