A LETTER TO MY FRIEND ON THE OCCASION OF LETTING GO
My dear friend,
You have been working at your task for some years now. I
recall the time you boxed up newspaper cuttings, greeting cards, notes from
people you had helped expressing their gratitude—boxed it all up and left it to
be collected the next time the city truck came through.
At the time, I wondered how you could let go of all those
things. My accumulation is similar, and I’m finding it difficult to cull the
items I still want to hang onto.
Why, I wonder, is letting go so hard?
Did you find it so? Did you agonize over whole stacks of
letters dating back thirty or forty years?
Much advice is written—and re-written—in magazines,
newspapers, on the Internet—but it boils down to this: “If you haven’t used it
in the last _____ years, pitch it.” The only difference from writer to writer
is the number of years—3 years? 5 years? 10 years?
What about something that has lasted 25 years or more? Does
it now have antique value? Do I care about that?
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You’ve given me good tips about this letting go business.
Take, for example, clothing.
·
Each time you buy new items, get rid of the same
number of old ones.
Okay, I can do that. I usually have plenty: too-small,
too-large, wrong color, scratchy, too hot, too cool—easy to find the right
number. Sometimes, I say proudly, I can discard/donate even more items than I
just bought. How about that? And since I don’t buy trendy styles, what I remove
from the closet isn’t any more attractive than what I put in its place. The big
advantage in taking this advice is that I don’t have to build another closet (or
room) to house an increase.
Books, now—that’s a different story. I know you’re not a
collector, and you take pleasure in passing on to other folks many books you’ve
enjoyed. But you also keep some, because, you say, those authors pleased you
and became like good friends; you look forward to rereading those stories.
So I’ve "taken a page out of your book" about books:
·
When my taste changes (now that I’m into my 8th
decade, this is not surprising), I can recycle books by donating them to my
library for their monthly sale or to the senior center where a minimal charge
for used books puts a few dollars in the center’s piggy bank. If the books are
mysteries, I check with my children first—they like different kinds, so I may
be able to pass along something they haven’t read.
The hardest category for me is correspondence. In my younger
years I wrote and wrote and wrote letters to my nearest and dearest. The
Internet and email changed that, and though I still write letters, they’re
usually typed to save my aging fingers. But receiving letters! What a joy! I’ve
written about that before, so I won’t go into raptures again. Except to say,
there’s nothing like a real letter, written/typed on paper, put in an envelope,
and sent off via the USPS to arrive at my house. A cup of tea, my feet up, and
I’m transported into the world of my friend or relative who sent the missive.
It doesn’t get much better than that. No wonder I have trouble disposing of
those good times, represented by letters and notes.
In thinking it over, I’ve concluded that letting go involves
more than sorting, discarding, bagging it up for the trash collection next
Monday.
Letting go means a break in a relationship with the items
from which I’m parting. For out-of-date clothing, books I no longer read,
there’s no trauma. But for very personal items—reminders of who I once was, who
I still am deep down, and what I meant to somebody, sometime . . . the letting
go can be painful.
So I ask myself these questions: Do I need those items to
remind myself of who I was? Don’t the memories attached to letters,
photographs, greeting cards remain with me?
-----
You’ve purged many, many things from your life. And I find
you are still the same person, without all the physical baggage that you’ve
shed.
Thank you for letting me see how that works.
With love and appreciation for who you are,
J
