The kitchen clock.

In the waning days of emptying out my old house, I was looking at the old electric kitchen clock from my grandmother's Baltimore rowhouse, wishing that it still worked, despite having gone still twenty-some years earlier, and, on cue, the sweep second hand started sweeping again. It made me smile.

Mind you, I don't believe in anything. Not god, not magic, not mystical balances and cosmic interventions, not mysterious moments to make you scratch your head, or even the guiding presence left behind by someone who really loved me. I don't need any of that, any more than I need golf or a beautifully seared steak or a large, luxurious sedan full of screaming toddlers, but I love a good story, and I like to imagine that my grandmother would have smiled about her old clock making a moment again.

I was banging around on that wall, unscrewing my old pencil sharpener and removing the hooks from the pegboard, and that's certainly what jogged the little AC-synchronous mechanism past a little flake of rust or a bit of something that had clogged it up, and that's fine. The story is more worthy than the underlying truth.

Standing there, in a now mostly empty damp old basement where a few boxes are clustering to leave and my father's old Craftsman radial arm saw looms alone in the space like a Moai on a grassy hillside, surrounded by the other toppled gods, it occurs to me that all my brooding over what's truly happening is familiar.

I had a stretch where, either as a favor, a side hustle, or an obligation, I ended up clearing out a number of densely packed and dusty households full of accumulation, from the houses where a wife died and the husband fled to a new life to the rambling estate of Maryland's 34th governor to the excesses of a late friend's obsessive collecting, and suddenly—

This is my estate. I put off my Swedish death cleaning and here I am, even though I think I've got a good stretch ahead. It's a monument to a lot of lives that started and fizzled. I found this lovely thing and meant to restore it to life again. I had this magnificent power tool at the core of a little woodshop. I saved this old object that was once incredibly expensive, or sentimental, or full of symbolic power, which I'd intended to wield on the path to somewhere new…and it sat, alone in a basement, twenty feet away from a stopped clock that had something wry to say about my intentions.

I have a home, but it is not yet my estate, and I wonder if I am just going to repeat the same pattern of being excited about new ventures, finding myself overextended, and shelving these ideas until I have to do this all over again, holding onto powerful tokens now coated with a mix of dust, cobwebs, and mildew and making the decision whether to put off their sentencing or to hurl them over the rusty metal wall of another thirty cubic yard dumpster.

The clock is ticking, or rather humming, as it's a plug-in electric clock and they just sort of hum.

What is significant and what isn't?

What is a path that I might actually follow and what is a shiny object that I'll snatch up like an eager jackdaw and set aside as a way to hoard all that imagined potential for a day that might never come?

I read a great book about time management recently, and it's one of the few useful self-help books I've ever read because it lays out an uncomfortable truth that's particularly relevant to me. When I complain that I somehow accomplished more when I was poor, working two jobs, and going to college, and managed to have a rich and rewarding social life by some mysterious process that I can't recall, the author points out that I, like most of my cohort, take on too much, without much forethought, and then get locked into a feeling of obligation to carry out tasks that are unquestionably impossible or at least comically unlikely, even when I've long since stopped being moved by what led me to take them on.

I'm brainwashed by the plastic fantastic why-not-have-it-all businessworld indoctrination machinery like everyone else, even when I feel smug about the ways I'm managed to sidestep those obligations (especially when it's just through something simple like not having to take on any familial management tasks for the first 48 years of my life), and I'm training myself to feel that as an itchy, scabby, muscle-cramping feeling instead of the "opportunity" that people who started their game from third base perpetually claim as the American birthright.

I can't do it all, or have it all.

Things must be managed.

"No" must be more frequent in my lexicon.

I look around and am pleased to see more and more empty space opening up, despite the punch in the gut that casting off a lot of it represents, and I feel the pull of "look at all this space I have to expand into new projects and to build new collections," but I'm learning—more air, more space, more lands in which to unfold are a trap, and "no" is a truly magical word.

I can still dream. I can still plan. I can still extend my reach, all while turning down fabulous opportunities, unbelievable deals, extraordinary finds, and glorious potential, just by tuning in on what is real and what is a fata morgana, hanging in the air just out of reach, else what's a heaven for.

I don't believe in a heaven, though. Everything I'm going to see or hear or learn or discover is in the world around me, and it's nearly infinite and I'm not. Deferring what I'm going to do to that illusory moment of when I clear the decks so I have a blank canvas and all the time in the world is a foolish thing that I've done way too much of, and the pain of this last estate clearance of the worldly goods of Joseph Belknap Wall, statesman, showman, master carpenter, curator of curiosities and impending miracles should be a potent warning to the next me I'm queued up to be in this thread of a life that crashlanded here on May 16th, 1968, when students were rioting for a new world in France and the Catonsville Nine were working on their plan for the next day's stand against atrocity. I can't do everything, or even all I want, wish, or are capable of doing.

In the end, what's left of my life will be a museum of false starts, moldering away in a wet basement or web-choked attic. What will matter is the stuff that was given space and enabled by the simple application of a two-letter word.

No.

But I'm keeping the inconsequential clock, at least for now.