The Bag Reserve Will Remain Under the Sink
There is a bag under the sink that holds other bags. Nobody put it there intentionally. Nobody is responsible for it. Nobody will remove it.
Under the sink, there is a bag.
The bag contains other bags. Thirty-one of them, by a recent count, though the number fluctuates as new bags arrive and the existing ones rearrange themselves into an increasingly compressed form. The bag is never empty. It has not been empty in several years. It has also never been opened with a specific bag in mind, retrieved that bag, and closed again with the task complete.
It is a reserve, not a resource.
The Record
Present at the meeting: the thin supermarket bags, the medium-weight pharmacy bags, the thick bags from the electronics store, two bags from a shop that closed in 2022, one bag from a conference that nobody attended, and a department store bag that has been there since a different era of the household's history.
All bags were kept because they might be useful. All bags have survived periodic reckonings in which the household considered whether they were still needed. All bags survived these reckonings by meeting the minimum standard: they could theoretically be used again, by someone, under some circumstances.
The circumstances have not arisen.
The Paradox
The bag of bags is not a storage system. It is a record of every shopping trip where the available bags exceeded the immediate need.
When bags are actually needed, the reusable bags are retrieved from the hook by the door. Those are the right bags. Those are the bags that get used. The thirty-one bags under the sink are the wrong bags in the right location, held by the logic that keeping them is easier than deciding to throw them away.
The Permanent Arrangement
Every few months, someone opens the bag of bags with the intention of sorting it. They remove some bags. They throw away the ones that are torn. They fold some of the medium-weight bags neatly. They feel productive. They close the bag.
Three weeks later, four new bags have arrived. The bag is the same size it was before the sorting. The sorting has been absorbed. The bag of bags does not care about sorting. It cares about persistence.
It will be there next year. It will be full. The reusable bags will be on the hook by the door.