Lighten Your Load

TASK #3: January 21st–January 26th

“A clear conscience is often the sign of a bad memory”. Unknown

My New Year’s resolution (the one that I am going to endeavor to keep, as opposed to the bullshit ones that I make every year, like: I will not drink beer during the week, or my annual promise to lose twenty pounds, promises that I make, I think, for effect only) is to get rid of some of the every growing assemblage of personal flotsam that that I have stashed away over the last twenty years, most of which is shoved into cardboard boxes crammed into our attic, the garage, and much to my wife’s consternation, the closet in our bedroom.

I know that I’m not alone in this…

Men stash away stuff like chipmunks, because We HATE TO THROW ANYTHING AWAY. And when your buddy says, “I don’t save shit”, he’s probably lying, which makes the obsession even worse.

I don’t think of myself as a hoarder. A hoarder is someone who saves weird crap, and saves it compulsively. Like the guy with a house full of newspapers, or jars of grease; or the guy who puts strands of thread in envelopes, and files them by color. That’s not me. I save things that came into my life and I can’t bear to pitch. Stuff like report cards, concert tickets, coins, trading cards, a label from a “Lady Of The Lake” butter container that can be folded in a certain way to make it look like the Lady had big boobs, my mom’s high school year book, and a linen napkin that I stole from a Paris cafe.

And then there’s the negative things. The bad report card, the summons I got after I was arrested for shoplifting, a break-up letter from my college girlfriend, an angry note from my mother (because I got arrested for shoplifting).

Why am I dragging this stuff along? I hardly look at it all. In some cases I can’t remember WHY I saved a certain item.

So, I promised myself that I was going to go through it all. ALL of it, and toss what is meaningless, give some of it to Goodwill, and repack and categorize the rest.

I’ve been at it, on and off, since the first of the year. I took all of the boxes out of the bedroom closet, went through them. I found some odd crap, like a rusty Swiss Army knife, which I debated whether I should donate, or throw out, a decision my wife made for me when she grabbed it out of my hand and dropped it in the trash can. I decided that I would only keep five items out of each box. Selecting what I wanted to save was difficult, but not impossible.

And you know what? I didn’t miss the knife, nor anything else that I pitched. As a matter of fact, it made me feel good.

TASK

Go into your basement, your attic, your garage, pull out those boxes and old suitcases and laundry bags and pour out your past in front of you. Select five items that MEAN SOMETHING to you, good or bad. And throw the rest of it away. Keep the photos. For now.

All the stuff in the picture that accompanies this task was mine. You can see why I didn’t want to pitch any of it!

Photos by Joe Doe and Charlie Marusiak on Unsplash