Weeding Out...

As I'm in the last week of my Shakespeare class... I'm of course planning ahead to the rest of the summer and what I'm going to do in my small breaks before I leave for Spain. One thing that is definitely on the list of must-do's is to move. I'm moving out of my apartment at the end of July, and then I'll have a couple weeks to finish my other two summer classes, unpack and re-pack, etc. before I leave for the semester!

Moving is not one of my favorite past-times. I've done a lot of it in the past five years, between the dorms, home, and apartments. I guess that's the bane of the college student's life. And it is kind of fun... to switch things up and have new experiences in a variety of living situations. I have some good memories from apartment life... from coming home from the BYU football game to a floor of suds (we put liquid dish soap in the dishwasher) to decorating different apartments on an extreme budget. I'm sure I'll have many more memories to come... but it'll be nice to bring my stuff back to my parent's house before I leave, so that I can go through the stuff I've collected over the years and do some major weeding out...

Which brings me to my topic of the day. I am not the most organized person on earth, and I can't deny that I have that part of me that hates throwing things away. It's not that I love clutter... rather, it's that this clutter somehow serves as a storage for memories. It's strange how while digging through an old pile of papers from freshman year of high school, the memories flood back, of what I actually did in my classes, of notes from friends, of my soccer schedule, my church activities, birthday cards... and a year of memories I had forgotten about comes back to me. The idea of throwing away the things that capture my history seems like a loss, like I'm losing the memories, too. However, I know that life isn't about the stuff accumulated, and it's rare that I actually go back to dig through this old stuff. But knowing I can, that is somehow a comfort.

However, I know I won't always have my parent's house to store my never-ending boxes of memories. I'll need to widdle it down to the most important ones, and let go of the rest. I don't want to open a storage unit for my old papers, clothes, stuffed animals... it's time to put what I really want into a book or a couple boxes and either give or throw away the rest. I know I'm sentimental, but I don't want to become the old lady whose house is so full of junk that there's not enough space in it to live and create new memories.

So, a shout-out of empathy to the pack-rats of the world, and a call to action...

I'll let you know how it goes :-)