Keep it or throw it out?
It’s not quite Shakespearean prose, but I reckon I’ve heard it more often than any line from Hamlet — from the voice in my head alone.
This time, the words were my mother’s. My parents are in the putting their house on the market, and part of that process includes cleaning out 26 years of assorted items. Even though I left the nest more than a decade ago, plenty of mementos from my childhood and adolescence stayed behind— which is why I got daily “Keep It or Chuck It” messages as my parents sorted through everything this summer.
With a few notable exceptions, the answer has always been the same:
Get rid of it.
***
It hasn’t always been this way. In fact, it rarely has.
Long before hoarders were immortalized on TV shows, I was on a mission — a mission to keep anything and everything. But I didn’t want to make a mess, so I would stuff cabinets, closets and out-of-sight storage spaces with piles of things I wanted to hold on to.
There were two reasons I obsessive took this approach. First, I wanted to preserve memories in a visible way. Second, I loathed the mental image of anything I’d bought or created wasting away in a landfill.
These sentiments are fine on a small scale — this is how scrapbooking and recycling came to be. The problem was that I felt this way about everything.
It started with physical items, but my mission quickly degraded my relationships with family and friends. I was constantly adding on, saving memories, maintaining everything I had accumulated.
I was afraid of letting go. And I was suffering because of it.
***
Letting go is an undervalued part of life. It’s something we all must do — after all, we don’t live forever — but it’s also something we try and avoid in our everyday lives. Breaking up is brutal, losing touch is unbecoming, and getting fired indicates failure. Our memories are the only part of the past we take with us to the present; those we share those memories with serve as the bridge between the two worlds.
So we hold on, incessantly. We become sentimental. We fixate on the past.
We cling to every detail of How It Was, so it can serve as the foundation for How It Is.
But all we’re really building is a burden. A bigger footprint, more items to keep track of, more meaningless details to weigh down our mind.
We must stop this madness.
***
If the past informs the present, and the present informs the future, we must move on from anything that doesn’t move us forward. We must master the art of letting go.
We must rid ourselves of the static. Let go of all the memories that leave us lost in Yesterday without a ticket back to the Here and Now.
We must move on from the mementos that don’t tell a story, or those we can’t tell a story from; they alone tell us nothing.
For growth guides us down the current of life; we can’t afford to be anchored in place by a fear of letting go. We must free ourselves and live unburdened.