Letting Go, Letting In

The elevator door opened; Frank saw it was his floor. He got out and went to his office. He stood there in the doorway looking at all his stuff, scattered about for disposal or for packing to be mailed back west. Piles of books, periodicals, offprints, Xeroxed sheets of stapled or loose paper, folded or rolled graphs and charts and tables and spreadsheets. His exteriorized memory, the paper trail of his life. An excess of reason.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. Forty Signs of Rain. New York: Bantam Books, 2004. 269.

Admittedly, I haven’t been trying as hard as I could to get rid of excess stuff I’ve accumulated over the years. Nevertheless, while I’ve resisted “Clean Sweep[ing]” myself, the lessons of the show haven’t been lost on me.

One lesson the organizer, Peter Walsh, is often called upon to impart to the show’s participants is that they don’t need to hold on to all their stuff to be/stay who they are, or to remember how they got there. In fact, Walsh’s very point is that in order to move into the future successfully, letting go of things is necessary. He shows participants how the things they’ve accumulated are clogging their lives, literally in material ways, as well as in psychological and emotional ways.

By no means does he make them purge all their possessions, but he does get tough with them about what they keep and why. He explores the attachments people have to certain things, and investigates the significance of these attachments. Not surprisingly, it is not often the items themselves which are significant, but rather how they are exteriorized, material evidence of meaningful moments in people’s lives.


I’ve been holding onto this pen for much too long…

And along with it, I’ve been holding onto the promises I made, and those that were made to me, for a never-ending love and life together—promises broken and love lost.

But no more.

Things change, and don’t always work out as we’d like them to.

Still, I hold onto the faith that such love exists, and only hope that I fully appreciate every taste of it I’ve gotten, and continue to enjoy.

Because sometimes, change brings about better things than we had imagined.