Learning to Let Go

I have a lot of things. A lot of things are kept as vague sources of material either for machines to be built or found-object art to be made.

All arms and flanges, bound for the orphange

This was part of a wheelchair I bought off a quadriplegic Burner a few years ago. It had worn out and he was junking it. It had good motors, which I'm keeping, and all kinds of interesting metal frame pieces and servos for moving the rest of his body, which I am not. But I only decided I'm not recently. So, finally, and not without a little regret, I sent it away.

"Bye-bye, honey. We'll see you at Christmas."

Lots of stuff made it out that day, including the things pictured here: Shedding.

The stuff orphange ...

.. is a lonely place.

But that was only a beginning. This was easy. Stuff with little intrinsic value. But a lot of stuff is hard to get rid of. It's attached to memories, to people, to family. I know my father and my grandmother and my kids and so on wouldn't mind, wouldn't care, wouldn't miss these things. Yet I know and feel that someone would, that someone out there feels very strongly about keeping this stuff around. Who, though? I tell myself it's nobody, that there's nobody who cares, nobody who's afraid that they are getting thrown out with the objects they are attached to. No one in my family is getting thrown out.

But that's not true. There is somebody. That somebody is me. Or rather, the me who existed back whenever those things were important. Like everyone else I've been many people, phased in increments through many identities over the years. All of them have accumulated stuff. When that me is no longer around, the stuff may lose its immediate importance. But the original intent in keeping it lingers because, you know, someday I'll get back to it. I never consciously decided not to be that person any more. I just got busy with other things, new phases in life, always assuming I'd get back to those other things when I had the time. But after enough time has passed, those old intentions just don't serve me. They're not going to happen. Or the time they will is so remote, I have to consider undercutting them just to free up space for the present. Or, as Sunya puts it, make room for my life.

I talk about writing, making, all these things I want to do that I don't have time for. I don't have room for them. Keeping all this detritus from previous lives is not allowing me room. I must make room for the future, and let go of my fear of that future's cost.

There is no place for fear there, for they teach only love. And so we must arrive with empty hands, our wings spread wide, with the faith that whatever awaits us is far better than whatever we had to let go of. -- Learning to Let Go

I brought another truckload of boxes back from storage the other day. I had nowhere to put them and left them on the front walkway for the time being. They were still out in the evening when it was time to go meet people for Second Saturday. The sky wasn't threatening. I knew it would be okay. When we got home again about two or three, the sky was cloudy but had stars. I put a tarp over them and went to bed. At ten I awoke to a downpour. I wasn't worried: I'd used a tarp. At eleven I looked out and the tarp had blown off. I brought them in under the eaves and later that night went through them.

The things that will be easy to discard, such as more wheelchair parts, were in waterproof bins. The cardboard boxes, now soaked through, were full of printed photographs. Pictures of my kids and my house-building and my life taken in the 1990s just before I transitioned to digital photography. None were ruined, of course, but they were wet. They were also bulky. They were also unlikely to ever get looked at much.

I spent time looking through them with a trash can handy. We're talking several shoeboxes worth of pictures, still all in their original drugstore envelopes. For each one I asked if it had been missed, if it would be missed, if anyone was every likely to regret their loss. For 99% of them the answer was no. I did not throw 99% of them away. More like 25%, if that. The negatives all went, the envelopes, the boxes. the rest are now in rat-proof containers in the attic, and someday I'll go through them and throw the rest away. I have a vague idea that the best of those lots are in photo albums at my kids' mother's house anyway. They could all go and no one would ever know. They didn't all go, but it was a start.

It was a start. Next: Moving my desk away from the wall so this wall of boxes can go behind it.