Letting Go...

I used to be a pack rat – saving, hoarding, and accumulating ‘things’. It didn’t seem to matter what those things were, I just didn’t like to throw stuff away. My bedroom in my parents’ home was lined with shelves of stuffed animals, some I’d had since I was a child, rows of cassette tapes – many of which I never even listened to, and my closet was packed with clothes that were too small (I might fit them again one day) too big (what if I have a ‘fat’ day?), or out of date (they may come back in style). I could not bring myself to get rid of anything.

Then something earth-shattering happened…we had a house fire.

Before the fire spread too far, I managed to throw some precious items out the window, including irreplaceable photographs, but by the time the fire had burnt its course, the vast majority of my ‘stuff’ was gone. Walking through the debris the next day was sobering. “This is what is left of my life”, I thought. What my parents and I had been able to save barely came to the top of the back of a half ton truck.

That was the beginning.

From that point on I vowed not to let myself get caught up in material items. Stuff bought is stuff that can be replaced. The real losses to me were the piles and piles of notebooks, poetry I had written and journals I had kept for years. You begin to put into perspective the things that mean the most to you, and what was important in this case was that no one died and no one got hurt.

Suddenly things become irrelevant.

Every six months I perform a ritual expunging – I choose one room and put on my ruthless hat. If I cannot leave the room without a garbage bag full of unnecessary items, then I have failed in my mission. To date, I have never failed. I do make deals with myself though. If there are items that I can’t bring myself to throw or give away, the deal is this: if I have gone another 6 months and not used the item, or referred to it, or even thought of it, it is to be released during the next “abolishment”.

But what about letting go of other elements? We tend to hang on to things that have outlived their purpose, people included. Friends come and go in our lives, but we still try to hang on to years old friendships that are no longer beneficial to either party, and instead, tend to act as excess baggage, dragging along like a weight behind you. How do you ‘discard’ friends? I tend to think in terms of reciprocation. If I have made a conscious effort to contact a person, and I receive no response, then I just let the person fall slowly off the radar. Because at that point, I consider it a mutual decision and I cannot be solely blamed for dropping the ball.

Letting go of guilt, worries, inhibitions, and fear becomes a little more complicated; these emotions are rooted in our inner core and difficult to leave behind – they are such a part of us that they become entangled and knotted in the fabric of our being. For some of us, they define who we are as humans. To perform an emotional purging takes a bit more courage. You have to be prepared to open yourself to scrutiny, and then discount it.

For me it is a daily and conscious effort. Up until recently, guilt had taken up a large part of my regular existence. By eventually realizing that this self-induced culpability was only injuring my own psyche, I was able to slowly chip away at it until it filled my mental refuse bin. I am doing similar things with worry, and fear. Inhibition is a little easier to leave behind, and the new-found freedom has opened up new avenues in both my personal life and my writing. I am able to say what I mean, without veiling my words with what I want others to hear.

My lesson learned (and continually learning) is that letting go can be mentally and physically liberating; kind of a weight loss of emotional proportions.