Hanging On To The Bits And Pieces
It's weird how as our life goes by we keep hanging on to all this stuff from the past, these bits and pieces that belong to different eras of our life.
Most of the time, it's a bunch of useless crap that we no longer have any use for whatsoever, but still, for some reason, it's crap that is very dear to us.
The other day I had one of those moments when something dawns upon you, and you suddenly understand a certain thing about your nature, and about human nature in general.
I think that in our present, we feel somehow disconnected from our past, as if it's all part of a past life, a distant memory, that we're not sure is true or not, not sure we really lived.
These small useless material things are more or less the only proof we have that we were there and we lived all that. Without them, our past doesn't exist. They're the only way to reassure us and keep our past alive in our present.
No wonder how dear they are to us.
I still have a bunch of stuff spanning my different ages stored here and there as some sort of anchor, a living memory of that age, a proof of existence. A teddy bear, a notebook, an old computer, a skateboard, legos, ...etc.
A pile of items that hold so much more value than any possible estimation.
Who Am I? Yahoo Time Capsule Children... Saddam Hussein Sentenced To Death By Hanging Real Life Ad And Popup BlockerThose small things... how they made every single of my moves difficult. But I love my american civil war soldier from gettisburg, my little plastic japanese cat from Soho, or my little wooden boar from Ain Drahem. All these small objects that have crossed continents (sometimes multiple times) remind me of moments, of places, of people. I gather all of these things (dust collectors some say) because they remind me of my past and bring some bitter-sweet memories along with them.
Posted by: Sleeplessjojo at May 23, 2006 09:54 AMYou know, your words made me think of how weird our emotions could get.
There are things that we consider precious and are ready to go through the fuss of moving them, cleaning them and keeping them safe no matter what they are; but then comes a day when these very same things we start to look at as clutter we should get rid of.
I guess it's the memory those pieces carry that makes us either hold on to them, or simply throw them away. A memory that was once a sweet valuable one, but then came a day when it simply means nothing no more, or is a source of pain we need to rid ourselves of...
I read something the other day relates to this, it's by Margaret Mead, she says:
"there were treasures on mother’s dressing table, too- a Wedgwood pin dish, a little porcelain Mary and her Lamb, the pale green, flowered top of a rose bowl that had broken, and mother’s silver-backed comb and brush and mirror. All these things held meaning for me. Each was- and still is-capable of evoking a rush of memories.
taken altogether, the things that mattered a great deal to me when I as a child are very few when I compare them to the over crowded shelves through which children today have to thread their way. Only if they are very fortunate will they be able to weave together into memories the ill-assorted mass of gadgets, toys, and easily forgotten objects, objects without a past or a future, and piles of snapshots that will be replaced by new, brightly coloured snapshots next year."
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