In moving house I had to clear a lot of stuff up, throw a lot away and generally reassess what is important to me, and what I need to keep hold of.
In my loft was a few boxes of memorabilia: letters (remember them?) sent to me from girls (I was at boarding school) throughout my adolescence; gig tickets; trophies; trinkets; bits and pieces from travelling. You know the sorts of things, stuff your partner is not interested in, and things that you would never show to your kids since they are not interesting enough, or are too personal, for anyone but you.
Then you realise that they have been in the loft for seven years without having been looked at, and in this process, you generally transfer them across to another box to be taken up into the new loft. As a result, you question the validity of keeping them at all. They are nuggets of memory of your life, of your earlier self. They may well give you a rosy warm glow when reading them or looking them over, but they provide no interest for any other human being.
The thing that hold you back from throwing these items away is the feeling that they are unique, and that there is no reversal of the ejection; that by throwing them away you are irreversibly erasing these memories from your life, bar some faint recollections stored in the brain.
But then again, since I am not looking at them as it is, they are effectively non-existent anyway.
This “what if?” mentality is what drives compulsive hoarders. “Well, I might use it for…” and “You never know when it might be useful…” like some rainy day insurance policy to ensure the retention of rubbish.
So I suppose the question becomes, are these sorts of things (letters, memorabilia etc) rubbish? Am I warranted in keeping them, and if so, why?
I am inclined to get rid of the boxes. Let the pat be just that.
