I was wondering.

Do y’all kept a lot of your childhood things?

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

If so, do you think they’ll be useful someday?

It’s just that the other night I started thinking about the boxes of journals I have upstairs in the storage space. And, eek, the threadbare, previously waterlogged box of school things that are probably no longer legible. Not just report cards or whatever, but binders of actual schoolwork. I haven’t looked at it in years so I don’t know what I kept, but I’m sure it wasn’t just my best work or even work of which I was particularly proud.

And then I started to think of all the digital files I’ve been lugging around with me from computer to computer. I mean every doc I’ve ever created (even logistical docs like pdfs of course schedules I once had to upload for various purposes), every pdf I’ve ever downloaded or been sent, and don’t even get me started on the emails. My Gmail is now more or less full and I don’t store photos (16000+) or any of the docs mentioned above there. Just emails. And whatever is in those emails.

I recently deleted some files from undergrad strictly because they were corrupt and wouldn’t open. I checked every single file before deleting a folder.

It’s a bit out of hand.

And when I started thinking about this, I wondered how much emotional weight I must be holding onto by keeping these things.

Sometimes in yoga, we’re asked to notice and release any holding our muscles might still be engaging in. It’s different from tension, from stress. Holding is subtle, hard to detect unless one slows down and tunes into each part of the body, breathes into that space and allows it to release. But as subtle as it is, it can accumulate if not given regular attention.

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Before I moved to Bath I moved around a lot in the Fargo-Moorhead area. Nearly every year since I was 17 I moved into a new place or back to an old place. And everywhere I went, I carried with me boxes and boxes of books, many of which I’d never read, along with whatever other things I kept.

It didn’t occur to me to release them into the wild and move across town lightly. When I moved in with a boyfriend, oh, at 23 or so, I took with me a huge desk I’d coveted and received in my teens into the apartment because that’s what you do, you carry all your things with you.

And when I moved out less than a year later because he’d started seeing other women and we did not have an open relationship, I had to arrange with a friend to help me move the desk even after I’d left and a new girlfriend had moved in (I remember this as weeks not months).

I didn’t even like that desk much.