Letting it go
Two months ago I blogged about four signs I put up over my computer. They were there to keep me focused when working on a task. They’re simple and iconic and in my field of vision for nigh on 18 hours a day.
And they don’t really work.
But that’s ok frankly. The problem is really that if I was working on something with any kind of focus at all anyway, I wouldn’t need them.
But something happens when you stare at these things every time you lean back in your chair, having a thought.
One of the four draws my attention sharply.
“Let it go”
It’s almost subconscious, but not quite. I can feel that telltale nagging pull at my mind as I look around. The increasing sense that my apartment is a mausoleum of my past more than a dwelling for my present.
I sit amidst hundreds upon hundreds of books that I don’t even pretend I’ll ever pick up. There are boxes of full (though mostly 1/3 full) journals. Hundreds (perhaps thousands) of pages of mental effluvia, transcribed when the pen and page was the best of all available ears.
There are souvenirs and rememberances from previous lifetimes; times I’d be free to relate and others too private for me to even whisper whilst alone.
And increasingly I think that at the very least, I am the summation of all of this. It is the efficient market theory of life. And I wonder what purpose these artifacts really serve. Because they clearly bind my head to the past they represent.
I can’t look at that red “neo native american” woven blanket over the back of my couch or my Djembe, sitting with a torn head next to it, without thinking of all the times I sat on it on the grass at pagan weekends, experimenting with all manner of things. Not the least of which were my morals. My stomach turns at the hordes of self obsessed whiners looking for validation without rules, respect without temperance.
Or the guitar I bought during my one year in college. An old Mexican fender squire, strung upside down so that it loses tuning if you look at it sternly. I never really played it. But I thought at the time it would bring some legitimacy to my total recklessness of not even bothering to attend classes.
But every time I look at that poorly carved “old sea salt” bank I think of my grandfather and how he used to send me at five and six years old down to the corner store in Watervliet with a buck for a pack of Luckys. I remember the unfinished plank floor in the shop (which might well be better described as a “shoppe”) and having to cross the train tracks which weren’t fenced in or gated. The bins of nickle candy.
Or the wooden knife carved out of a stick that my aunt’s first husband, Paul, made me at our summer place when I was about the same age. I watched the wizardry as he took a simple knife to a piece of wood and breathed life into it. The perfect rounding of the top and sides of the blade. They were divorced soon after and he largely disappeared from the family mythology.
So as I go through boxes of trinkets I wonder… how do I know what to keep? What matters enough to pass forward, should my life surprise me by not turning fast off that all too delicate course? Assuming it hasn’t already.
Some of it is obvious, truly. But do I really rid myself of the ransom note for my monkeys? Or the letters back and forth to Warsaw? Are they memories of people who cared whose talismans I ought keep for dark times? Or are they chains around my heart, however pleasant?
What about all that writing? All those hundreds of thousands of words accumulated over almost thirty years? Are they of no value going forward? I wince upon reading most any of them as they are so often naught but therapeutic remains of emotional times too dark for me to have contained (or perhaps from before I was able to contain them.) Surely those must go. (Ironically as I write this I realize those are the easy bits.) Some of it deserves to be kept and that ought be transcribed. But most of it needs to be burned.
But is it honest to toss the bad and keep the good? I don’t know. Maybe it is. It feels deceitful.
This culling process will probably take a very long time once I decide to stop just looking around the room, thinking about it.
And actually start letting it go.
May 2nd, 2009 at 11:10 am
You really are a dear! Just keep letting your honesty lead you.
As for me, I could use a little more of the hanging onto things, and a little less of the cavalier gypsy mentality. Even now I ponder running away. . .
:o)
May 2nd, 2009 at 11:41 am
I think all my significant memorabilia can fit into one box, or maybe two. I tend to have fits of purging, getting rid of all the things that don’t seem relevant to me anymore. Sometimes later I might regret having let them go, sometimes not.
First instincts are usually best, at least for me. If it hurts deep down to think of something not being there next week, or next month…. put a dated post-it on it and next time you get the urge, you’ll know when the last time you needed this or that item.
For the record, I toss the bad. Usually I don’t even keep it in the first place.
I’m one of those people.
May 2nd, 2009 at 3:00 pm
A dear? Why thanks. I’ll take it ;)
The post-it thing sounds great. But there’s just no way it’ll happen.
Tossing the bad is the easy part :-) Well… I haven’t done it yet and I know how I get, so we’ll see…
May 2nd, 2009 at 4:33 pm
I thought letting it go referred to the full magazine during code reviews.
May 5th, 2009 at 7:40 am
Sometimes, things from the past give you a slap upside the head and remind you how far you have come. Sometimes, they make you wish you could make a few changes and sometimes they give you a much needed boost to move forward. Since I can look back unto a past that is much more distant than yours and a future that is winding down, I think the thing to do is to fill today to the max. It’s not long before it’s all gone.
However, I can tell you that your words are a treasure and I don’t believe that you should ever distroy them, as a matter of fact there should be lots more of them.