Expandable space

Growth is inevitable

This article was written as a contribution to the Soaring Twenties (STSC) Symposium. October’s Symposium theme is “growth” , or it could be “how to grow your xyz” — there’s a discussion going on about that, but I’ve decided to publish this anyway! The STSC is a group of creatives who write, paint, versify and experiment their way through life. Join us!

To the casual observer our garden shed is small. It’s not the sort of place where I’ll be writing my memoirs while sipping the tea I made on the just-enough-water-for-one kettle and listening to Vivaldi on the custom-built stereo system installed by experts. Let’s put it this way. We have this sort of lopper thing for snipping the high branches off the winter-flowering clematis, and it’s taller than the shed. So, in order to store it, we have to place it at an angle, in one of the corners. But the surprising thing is the amount of stuff that we have to move just to get at it when we wish to use it: two ladders, three assorted brooms of different types, a lawnmower, three bags of cat litter, several pots of paint that were left over from the last time we had decorating done, several rolls of wallpaper, a rolled-up carpet and two garden chairs. Retrieving the lopper requires military-style planning, yet no matter how precise the operation we almost invariably narrowly miss knocking off bottles of white spirits, methylated spirits, and other assorted poisons.

A few months ago we decided to have a huge clear-out, and I mean huge. It required a trip to the council dump to get rid of it. But here’s the odd thing: despite not having bought anything extra since then, the shed is once again full of stuff. If anything, it contains even more stuff than it did before. 

Here’s another example. I’ve been clearing out my vast cache of published articles. I have innumerable box files, each of which contains my clippings. And only the clippings, not the entire magazines in which they were published. The slick (if I say so myself) operation consists of scanning each article, then recycling or shredding it, then disposing of the box file itself once it’s been emptied. Yet the pile refuses to go down. Compare these photos. The one on the left was taken in April. The one on the right was taken in August, five months later. If anything, the stack is now bigger than it was.

Spot the difference

The inescapable conclusion I draw from this is that, just as Parkinson¹ correctly observed that work expands to fill the time available, stuff expands to fill the space available. Perhaps this will come to be known as Freedman’s Law. There clearly exists an elemental force whose raison d'être is to enable stuff to, as my wife puts it, breed. As she reminded me, nature abhors a vacuum. I think of this elemental force as the Space Force.

One of these days I shall hire a large skip, and fill it with all the box files from my office and the extraneous stuff from the shed. I know it won’t do any good though, ultimately. The Space Force, espying an opportunity, will simply, slowly, inexorably fill it up again.

1. This is a reference to Parkinson’s Law. His book contains several “laws”, of which this is the most famous.