The Art of Letting Go
In 2019, I started chronicling the process of temporarily moving in with my mother, into the house my grandparents left behind. In the following excerpt of that diary, I had some thoughts on the objects of our daily lives, how they seem to follow us around, how to let them go, and what it all means.
Letting go can be really hard. There has been an accumulation of stuff in this house going on for many years now, beginning with my grandparents. It seems to me, that as they got older, control over their environment began slowly to slip away. So there already had been a slow but steady accumulation of things going on, when my mother moved in with them. Before that, she lived in her own house, filled with her own stuff. She brought that with her. And now I´ve moved in and brought even more. It feels like layers and layers of things, spanning about six decades, and incredibly different lifestyles. So, in order not to suffocate, we must let go what has no purpose, no meaning in our present lives. If I can actually use it, good. If I don´t use it the way it was intended, but it makes me happy to look at, also good. If it sits in a box in the basement because I can´t use it, don´t want to see it, but feel the need to keep it anyway, not good.
During the last week or so, I unpacked four boxes of kitchen stuff I had brought with me. In order to fit it all in, we had to let some old, unused items go. In hindsight, it feels almost like a sitcom, Marie Kondo gone horribly wrong. First, we carried all the stuff that already was in the kitchen into the living room. Then we added my kitchen stuff to the pile. After everything was in one place, we began sorting through it, deciding what to keep and what to let go. In theory this sounds like a simple enough task, but like I said, it all went horribly wrong. I would put a broken bowl in one of the boxes for discarded items. My mother would be hovering in the background, going through the boxes when I wasn‘t looking. She‘d then bring back the broken bowl, outraged that I would even consider parting with this super special object. "Yes, it‘s broken and unusable," she´d say, "but I really like it!"
We talked a lot about what we wanted to keep beforehand. She told me she didn´t like round drinking glasses, but preferred the polygonal ones. So I put the round glasses in the outbound box. "How dare you put this glass away! That´s my favorite glass, ever!"
"But it´s round. You said you didn´t like the round glasses."
"But this one has a pattern of leaves on it!!"
Suffice it to say that sorting through the kitchen stuff turned into a highly emotional endeavor, exhausting for everyone involved.
It made me think about the emotional side of letting things go. For me, it is usually a joyful process. It feels like an act of unburdening, of focusing on the things I love, of creating space for new things to come. But it can also be scary. I kept my notes from university for a long time. We‘re talking about almost ten years here. During that time, I lived in five different apartments. Every time I moved all my old notes, essays, and reading materials with me. When I finally let them go, it felt like a great weight had been lifted. I had made a choice to not delude myself any longer that I would revisit this text or look up that subject sometime in the future. Letting it go created space in my bookshelf that could be filled with new books and other things that were important to who I was now, and who I wanted to be in the future.
But it was also painful, and actually really scary. Letting go is final. What if I changed my mind in the future? What if I overlooked something, and it would be lost forever? If I threw years´ worth of notes into the trash, did that mean all the work I put into writing them had been pointless? I had to take some deep breaths and almost force myself to just go through with it. It felt like saying goodbye to the person I had once been, but during the process of letting go I realized, I already wasn´t that person anymore. I wasn´t loosing or disrespecting anything. I kept a few essays I was proud of, took a deep breath, and let the past go.