The Trouble With Sending Old Things To The Golden Dumpster In The Sky
No, I'm not referring to your mother-in-law.
Sometimes I cringe when I browse through my old travel photos. Not because I was 20 pounds lighter back then but because I still own some of the clothing I wore in those photos as many as eight or ten years later.
Trouble letting go much? Jeez!
It’s kind of creepy how difficult it is to let go of things from the past. It’s as if inanimate objects hold everything we know and love about particular moments in time, and those moments are preserved in the very items we hang onto.
I still have a pair of dirty jeans that have accompanied me on every single trip I’ve ever taken since owning them. That’s a lot of worldly dirt contained in those denim fibres. How can I possibly let go of them? That dirt converts into memories, experiences, and epic moments in my life.
Plus, the jeans make my butt look good. 😁
I still have beads from a bracelet that a monkey yanked off my arm seven years ago at a Jamaican zoo. I was pissed when the stupid monkey broke it so I picked up all the beads from the ground, put them into a Ziploc bag and kept them.
My mom made me that bracelet. She’s still alive and well and lives up the street from me so why can’t I just let go of the beads? It’s not like I need them to remember her.
The doozy of ALL things to let go of…is luggage
How does one come to terms with letting go of something that’s been a trusty sidekick on life-changing journeys? It’s like throwing away your best friend.
More importantly, WHERE do we throw it when it’s dead? I can’t bear the thought of just chucking it into a dumpster and letting it end up in a landfill when it has so much foreign dirt attached to it.
I left this rolling duffel bag sitting prominently in my bedroom for at least a year. It kicked the bucket on my journey to New Orleans in 2019 but it certainly didn't deserve to get tossed.
Before New Orleans, this bag travelled faithfully by my side through every trip I’d taken in eight years. That old Reebok bag is the one I moved to Jamaica with in 2011 and it subsequently accompanied me on at least twenty more life-changing adventures.
That brave bag even embarked on a solo, five-day adventure to Barbados without me while I sat in Montreal waiting for a standby flight that never materialized.
It’s safe to say it soaked up at least a decade’s worth of foreign dirt, air, alcohol, critters, and sand particles into its fibres. It certainly could have been classified as a contagion by the World Health Organization but I still had trouble parting with it.
But something violent happened to it on a flight home from New Orleans and it could no longer serve its divine purpose of securely carrying my travel junk.
If that bag had been a piece of hard luggage from the old days, I may have converted it into furniture somehow. People do crazy cool things with old luggage.
Another travel item I have trouble discarding is airport baggage tags. I can’t remove the old one until I’m embarking on a new journey and I usually make the airport check-in lady do it for me. I don’t have the heart to let go.
Travel sticks to our soul
No matter where our adventures take us something about each journey embeds itself into our souls.
I suppose that’s how the term, “Wanderlust” came about. When we return home we bring a piece of each journey with us. Some pieces are abstract, some are very real, and ALL of them are woven into our luggage and our souls.
Why should we want to let go of that? And how?
I was once told my house looked like a grandmother's house. There's a good reason for that. So much came from her house, a house I loved.
I struggle with letting go everyday.
After my parents died and we condensed all their things we wanted to save, it all boiled down to 1 box. You know what? I don’t even know what’s in that box today - more than 7 years later. It is just ‘stuff’. We then downsized a house and stuff from almost 25 years of marriage to move to Costa Rica. It was hard, but I realized again it’s just ‘stuff’. It’s freeing if and when you can do it. Now that we’re back in the U.S., I do find myself not wanting much stuff. Good luck to all!