Hunting & Gathering

Being about to move, a lot of decisions have to be made. What will I need at my new place? What is worth keeping? And has the time come to let some of the things that I hunted and gathered over the past years go?


And while wrecking my brain trying to make decisions, I wonder why people collect and buy all these stupid little things. Why is it so hard to throw stuff away? This pullover we did not wear in months, these pair of shoes which are so broken that they will fall apart only at the attemt to take a walk. The receipts from the last holiday in Sweden. And the books we have been reading a hundred times already and did not pick up in years. We might think that we will loose our memories about the moment when we saw the pullover in the window of this little shop in France, or the first day at school where I wore those shoes for the first time, the nice cupcake that I bought and the wonderful person I shared it with, and the feeling I had and the person I was when I read this book for the first, second and third time. 


And by sorting out things, pieces of our memory, don't we also make a decision which things we want to remember and which situation we rather would forget? Keeping the receipt from the little café but not the receipt from the restaurant where we had the awful lunch is like saving the good memories and cherishing them while destroying others by throwing them in the bin. 


Maybe this sorting through memories is healthy because we can build us up a nice world that we can escape to when times get rough and the real world does not hold a lot of nice experiences for us. But then again, not every nice memory can be kept so at one point we have to tell all this little memory reminders


"Thank you! It is an absolutely wonderful memory that I am reminded of when I look at you. But if this was a truly magical moment, I will remember it even though there is nothing that can remind me of you." 


and let go...