These last few months have been exceptionally challenging for many reasons. The biggest is the move and subsequent clean up and clean out of the first. I am trying to buy a second house and keep the first. The economy just seems to say “rent out the first”. I guess that’s how people become “unintentional landlords”. No matter, I have thought it was a good idea before. I may learn something to the contrary but I hope not. Anyway, the challenges of emptying one’s own home have been closer to the heart than expected. It’s amazing as to just how much of the stuff of life collects in the corners of your home.
I have a friend that said it’s “Stuff Hidden In Tubs”. Think about the first letters of that for a second.
Yeah, there’s lots of it, the Stuff Hidden In Tubs that seem to keep coming out of places you thought you once cleaned out. Some of it really isn’t that stuff in the tubs but it’s memories from the past, old pictures, love letters, greeting cards and gifts and general trinkets and reminders of the past. Things that have memories attached to them and seem to never make their way out of our lives. They can serve as a roadblock when packing up to move because there seems to be a sense of throwing away a past life when we dispose of this stuff and yet we know that time has already come and gone. What makes it difficult is that we enjoy remembering those good times and we like to remember that there were some good things about us and that we weren’t so bad that there was nothing good about the past days in past relationships.
We cringe at the the idea of not being able to recall the good experiences from a past love or lover.
To throw out that thing is to remove the object that triggers the good memory. It’s not always about being materialistic as it is about being sentimental and having the ability to “remember when” and realizing that our choices in the past were not failed attempts at life but moments of glory that will be remembered from time to time when we find ourselves confronted with those objects that remind us of such things.
This brings me back to the big move. I think I am going to build a big wooden box and begin dropping the “remember when” stuff in it. There’s nothing wrong with having such a box but it’s not healthy to spend too much time there because life and time march onward. There’s no stopping it and what ‘s more important than living in the past is living in the present and making new memories.
-C
Rowland Ramble - 