Is it so terrible, having to look at all my belongings?
My office has no closet, so several years ago I rented a small storage closet down the hall. Gradually I filled it up with stuff that I had no place for and didn’t want to see.
Last month the building informed me of its plan to build an electrical closet in what had been my storage. So all these things barged back into my office. No other storage is available, forcing me into a standoff with them.
It’s like looking at old clothes, except that the notes, books, and writings I had stored away record the use I have made of my mind. Mementos of my enthusiasms, mental wanderings, and lasting passions, they inevitably resurrect the human relationships that formed around them. And, just as every human relationship has a different form, meaning and ending, so my archive records how my various intellectual expeditions blossomed, transmogrified, petered out, or liberated me. Sorting out these files, my present self saunters down a strange memory lane.
“Who started what” strikes me as an important theme. Some of what I’m hanging onto sprang from my own desires and inclinations. In other cases, I wrote or studied for the sake of a relationship: I didn’t choose the project or the patron, but they chose me. Knowing this, I expect “the big sort” to fortify the boundaries that paradoxically set the intellect free.
Sam Dune says
Dear Celia, looks like you have quite a bit of sorting and organizing ahead. UGH. I wish you luck.
I had to do pretty much the same when my mom moved out of an apt in 1991 that she and my dad had purchased in 1961 and where I was raised. My father had died and my mother was headed out to Seattle. I had moved out in 1987 but came back to help my mom sort, organize, and toss out many items (to me, too many) from our large two storage spaces in the basement of the building. A heavy nostalgia came upon me.
Celia says
Dear Sam,
Throwing away more items than you wanted to sounds sad indeed. I unabashedly keep things that remind me of my loved ones gone. I also keep things that testify to some happy or even miserably pivotal stage in my life.
“The big sort” is an opportunity to get rid of a lot of bland stuff that arouses only ambivalence and to carry forward what is empowering. Happily most of what is at the office relates to my work and has little to do with my family.