Stuff & Clutter seem to go together, as the song might have said, like love & marriage. You can’t have one without the other. Like love & marriage, stuff and clutter is fraught with conflicting emotions. We might love our stuff (or our spouse), but sometimes the clutter (or the marriage) is almost too much to handle.

A popular concept is to get rid of clutter by getting rid of stuff, which seems like a probable solution. The reality of the situation often is that while the old stuff is going out the back door new stuff is coming in the front. This is what is known among the experts as the “What the Heck am I Going to Do with all this Crap?” dilemma.

Those of us who live with stuff & clutter are pressured by friends, relatives and neighbors to do something about it. The Buddhists, a kindly, admirable, lovable bunch for the most part, set a bad example by living with very little stuff. Therefore, no clutter.

Gardeners like myself need to have a certain amount of stuff such as shovels, rakes, hoes, cultivator tools, forks, pots, loppers, trowels, spoons, grow lights, water containers, hoses, garden carts, wheelbarrows, fence posts, trellis’s, stakes, seeds, trays, watering cans, mauls, pumps, and that’s just for starters.

There is a minority of often successful people, who have stuff & clutter and are quite comfortable with it. They don’t seem to give a rat’s behind whether they have clutter or not. Perhaps we can learn from them. They have a secret.

Their secret is that they know where everything is. Through some gift of genetics or upbringing their minds are able to keep track of all their stuff, no matter what pile it’s in or shelf it’s on. They are in control and they are happy.

The rest of us have three possible paths before us, not as cluttered as the Buddhist’s 8-Fold Way. Maybe they could tidy that up a bit?

We could try to develop the exquisite clutter-memory of the few mentioned above, OR, we could take up Buddhism, OR, we could realize that we’ve got the abundance of the universe collected right there in front of us. Why should we throw it all out and have to start over again? That’s what I’m doing. It’s a one-fold path, and it’s about as uncluttered as you can get.