Set For Life...and a little while longer...

The other day I was cleaning and filing in my office area.  My husband and I have a habit of shoving things like envelopes and stamps and note pads into an overhead cabinet, which means that each time you open the doors you run the risk of being bonked on the head with a label maker or stapler.

I hauled everything out of the cabinet and began deciding what should be kept, what could be tossed and what could be better stored elsewhere.  As I was performing this task, I began to realize just how many custom return address labels I had stuffed into this small space.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who receives those unsolicited return address labels from organizations like St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, the Audubon Society, Easter Seals, The American Red Cross and the World Wildlife Federation.  These are what I call “guilt labels”: these charitable organizations send free address labels with your name on them, banking on the idea that you’ll feel too guilty to just pocket the labels without sending them a donation.  Clearly they have never met me.

And so my office cabinet is filled with stacks of “Laura Anderson” labels bearing pictures of birds, cutesy kittens, classic cars, snowflakes and about a hundred other graphics.  As I leafed through the huge pile of labels, I reflected on how rarely I mail anything these days, and wondered at what point I could logically use up all that had been sent to me.  And that’s when I realized I had achieved S.A.B.L.E.

S.A.B.L.E. is an acronym my sister taught me which stands for “Stash Acquired Beyond Life Expectancy”.  In a nutshell, it means that you’ve collected enough of an item to guarantee that you could never possibly use up said item between now and the time you leave this earth.  My sister is passionate in the art of counted cross- stitch, and has an enormous amount of patterns, needles and embroidery floss.  When her local Wal-Mart eliminated its craft department and discounted all their embroidery floss to mere pennies a skein, my sister bought it all.  And that’s when she introduced me to the idea that, despite our best intentions, we sometimes go overboard in collecting and acquiring things that we couldn’t possibly use up in our lifetime.

S.A.B.L.E isn’t limited to return address labels or embroidery floss though.  You might be an avid scrapbook enthusiast, with thousands of pages of card stock and tens of thousands of stickers and embellishments.  Exactly how many photo albums do you plan to make in your lifetime?  Is it possible that you might have more scrapbooking supplies than you have actual photographs? 

Or perhaps you’re an avid newspaper reader.  Are there stacks of newspapers and magazines in your house, set aside for that rare moment of spare time when you can catch up on the news?  You might be surprised to find that the “news” at the bottom of the pile is more than five years old.  Why not just toss out this fire hazard and start fresh with tomorrow’s paper?  What will it feel like in 15 years when you realize you’re the last to learn about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ breakup?

I have a habit of acquiring books at yard sales, book sales and flea markets.  I can’t resist discount books (books for a buck are my favorite) and while I have all intentions of reading every last book, I get distracted by some shiny, new book that’s just come out that everyone else is currently reading.  The lure of the library and all those free books often trumps the books I have sitting right on my shelf.  I bet if I stacked up all the books I’ve got stashed around the house, I’d find that in order to finish them all, I’d have to live to be 105.

My husband has a tendency to hold onto things because “…some day they’ll be worth something.”  Items that might become valuable antiques or collectibles don’t really fall into the S.A.B.L.E. category.  S.A.B.L.E. items are more like consumables, which can be used up within a reasonable amount of time…unless you collect a boatload of them.

Getting back to the address labels…I thought about how infrequently I mail anything via snail mail.  Aside from the occasional birthday or sympathy card, and the one or two bills a year that can’t be paid online, these labels just sit on the cabinet shelf collecting dust and waiting for new friends to arrive from St. Jude’s and Easter Seals.  It’s not like I paid anything for them.  Why not just toss the majority and save just a few?

In the end, I removed all of the labels from the shelf, slid them into a folder, and then placed the folder in my filing cabinet.  Old habits die hard I guess; I just couldn’t bring myself to throw them away.  Apparently S.A.B.L.E. is the very top of a slippery slope, and at the bottom is the popular television series, “Hoarders”.

Hopefully you won’t see me on it anytime soon.  But if you do, you’ll know it all started with the labels.