I have a friend. She holds on to stuff. To the past. She saves them and looks after them as if her life depended upon them. She doesn’t let anyone throw them away. Not even when her drawers have no more space in them. No, the past stays with her. I ask her, why? And she says, well she doesn’t say but I assume, that it’s because she feels if she throws the stuff away, they’ll take the memories with them. As if throwing them away will somehow lessen their importance. And even if there is no significance to the memory, if the object tends to make her even a little bit nostalgic, she’s keeping it. So you can imagine, all sorts of scraps of paper, and beads, and diaries, and threads, and buttons, and letters, and small things are stuffed in that drawer. Paper chats from school days, and college days, letters from friends, acquaintances and relatives, useless drawings and doodles by self or friends… Diaries full of offending comments by people, lovely text messages, amazing narrations of amazing events, memorable conversations with random or dear people… You name it, it’s there.
I find her habit rather silly. Because I believe we should let go. We can only start living today if we let go of yesterday. It is true that our yesterdays make our todays, but that does not mean that we start giving them so much significance that they slowly and eventually seep into our todays in ways that may affect our tomorrows.
I used to be like that too. Saving pieces of paper, tissue, and filling up diaries of events that may or may not matter and then save them, keep them dear to life. But I realized then, that those things are only cluttering my mind and cupboards. That I need to clear space to let new experiences take their place. That I need to let go of people and make space for those who might actually matter. So I cleared up the boxes, emptied the cupboards, and threw away the useless scraps of paper. I am currently in the process of clearing my mind too. Erasing negative emotions is proving to be very hard. And letting go of people? Lets just say… It’s too easy to let go of some, and way too hard to let go of some others. And it isn’t possible to just tell yourself to hate one and love another. Not if the heart isn’t willing to. But that wasn’t really the point of this post.
The point is, it’s good to de-clutter.
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