Releasing The Past

Today, in the course of cleaning (it's the weekend--what else would I be doing?), I came across preschool artwork and handouts from fifteen-years-ago seminars, welcome packets from companies I've left already, and little souvenirs whose origins I barely remember. Before I knew it, I had filled a giant garbage bag. It was just the tip of the iceberg, but it felt good.
 
I am a keeper. Whether it's a gift from a friend or relative, or the evidence of a purchase, or the construction paper "snapshot" of a child from some moment in time, I default to keeping it. After all, you never know when you'll need it, to refresh your memory, or to prove your case with a service provider, or to re-teach yourself something you learned many years ago.
 
The problem is, when you keep all of these things, you can't even find them quickly enough to accomplish any of these worthy goals. Are you really going to spend an afternoon going through preschool artwork to remember your kids at that age? Is the information from that course really relevant--or accurate--in the workplace anymore? Keeping may be a lovely thing, but when it means that the climbing over and the wading through precludes actually using what you are keeping, somehow, the "lovely" kind of goes away.
 
I am not wholesale releasing my past. Neither time nor emotion would allow that. But even if I do fill a few more bags, I am realizing that releasing the tangible pieces of a past doesn't mean the past won't endure. It just means we have to hold on to it in different ways--in the work that we do NOW, in the records we keep and use NOW, and in the memories we enjoy and retell NOW, even without the construction paper evidence to back them up.
 
Releasing the past doesn't have to mean letting it go. It just means moving it around a little, so that we can still have room to enjoy the present.