Why did I keep this?

I recently moved from a house to an apartment with about half the square footage. Prior to the move, I felt compelled to purge unnecessary items from my belongings.

I’ve gotten rid of things during previous moves, but this round was by far the most thorough. I felt like God wanted me to not only get rid of things, but also look at and touch just about everything in my possession: books, tools, photographs, keepsakes and consider whether I really needed them. We’re talking hundreds of items.

It was extensive. And exhausting.

It’s a lot of work to comb through your belongings and sift through what you have, the reasons why you acquired them in the first place, what they mean to you now, and reckon any feels that come up in the process.

Some of the things I got rid of included:

• Grade school photographs. Why did I keep all of those red-eye photos of Spirit Week? Who are these people from high school? If the memory wasn’t worth remembering, the photos went in the trash.
• Letters from college friends I no longer correspond with. I thought I threw those letters out years ago.
• A child's bench with a folding lid for toy storage that has been part of my life since the beginning of memory—almost thirty years. It always contained Brio train set pieces.
• A beautiful cedar hope chest that my mom gifted me. It came from the arts and crafts exhibit at the Angola Prison Rodeo at the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
• The remaining childhood quilts that my grandmother made for me. Unfortunately, my mom had stored them in a bin with mothballs for so long that it was impossible to get the smell out. I know because I tried.
• Operation manuals for things I no longer owned.
• Almost all of my CDs. When was the last time I spun up a CD instead of streaming?
• College artwork from my Drawing I and Drawing II classes at SCAD. Did I really think I could sell my clumsy conté crayon scribbles and charcoal sketches on eBay?

Some items were sentimental, and I was surprised that I was able to get rid of them so readily. Donating and trashing the others was relatively easy because they had no real use value.

As these items exited my life via donations and the garbage can, I quickly discovered I had kept things for a variety of (bad) reasons:

• Vain sentimentality.
• I felt obligated to keep them (furniture and gifts).
• I never thought about why I kept them (photographs and letters).
• I thought it might be useful someday.
• It was a project that I “just hadn’t gotten around to yet.”
• I thought I was doing my future self a solid by keeping things that I might want to remember/revisit/reflect upon at some indeterminate tomorrow.
• I forgot they existed.

What surprised me the most during the discarding process was feeling a serious mental and emotional weight being lifted. I didn't realize how much headspace possessions actually possess.

Possessions take up mental RAM simply by being something that you have to remember owning.[mfn]RAM stands for Random Access Memory. RAM is what enables your computer to juggle many simultaneous processes, such has keeping open six dozen browser tabs while read the news, listen to Spotify, and write a paper.[/mfn] If they require maintenance, they require you to think about said maintenance and work it into your schedule. Sometimes things surface memories that are pleasant, unpleasant, neutral, or fuzzy like your mom's VHS recordings of your birthday party. Plus those memories have emotions tied to them that can put a weight on your heart. And finally, they take up literal space in your closet, under the bed, and in various nooks and crannies.

Although the cost of keeping such items can’t be calculated in monetary terms, that amount of space is akin to an Amazon Distribution Center. I have plenty of other things to think about without unnecessary items taking up free rent in my mind and heart.

The Lord wants us to be free, and for me, that meant letting go of things that I had kept without question.

Here are some questions I’m asking myself as I continue rooting through my things to get down to the essentials:

• When is it OK to keep something for the sake of memory?
• When is it best to get rid of something and just let the memory be a memory?
• When is it best to let a memory die?
• Why keep something if I can’t remember I own it?

I’m discovering that most of the time, the answer is to just let it go.