After owning our home for nearly ten years, we’re only now in the process of sorting out all those things we said we’d get to one day but never did. We got a new kitchen at the end of last year, and recently we had everything painted and put in new flooring. In preparation for the work, we emptied a few of our rooms, stuffing our years of accumulated stuff (I’m not allowed to say junk) into plastic tubs. The work complete, we’re now putting everything back.

Well…not everything.

While carting tubs of stuff up and down the stairs, I grumbled about how much of it was my husband’s (who then retorted that the majority of it was mine – a fact that is not only alternative but utterly impossible to verify).

‘They’re my memories,’ he’d reply plaintively.

I lost count of the number of times I rolled my eyes. But as we began to get our rooms back into order, it became obvious that not everything needed to be cherished until the end of our days.

There was a good amount of paperwork like old receipts, electricity and water bills, payslips and such, which pretty quickly went in the recycling. The other stuff – the printed photos and the birthday cards and the collectibles – was harder to get rid of.

Emotional Connections

What is it about stuff that makes us get so attached? Sure, it’s a tangible link to our past. Archivists today pale at the thought of the black hole in our records that is coming thanks to the digital age. All that information lost, all those stories stuck in electrical limbo.

Don’t get me wrong, I love heritage. I have immense respect for people and institutions that try to wrangle our collective history into some sort of comprehensible narrative. But I no longer want it in my house.

Once we started making the hard decisions about what stayed and what went, it became easier. I wasn’t completely ruthless, however. A lot of things I just changed format.

For example, boxes of papers I’d kept with old university writing assignments were scanned and then the paper copies ditched. (Though really they should have been ditched as the writing is atrocious.)

Perhaps I’ve merely just delayed making a decision until a later date or until a glitch wipes out every hard drive and the Cloud. But at least it’s no longer taking up space.

My husband has been even more ruthless. Photos of people long forgotten have been tossed in the rubbish bin of history. Items of importance or that are particularly cherished have been kept or scanned but otherwise box after box has been emptied. There’s a noticeable difference.

I can’t help but wonder what does all this discarding mean when it comes to remembering our past. In years from now, will we regret having thrown out so much of our history? Will long to thumb through old photos and reminisce about simpler times or past heartaches?

On the other hand, maybe it’s good to let go of certain things. Painful memories resurfacing as your eye falls on a photo of a long lost love or of that friend who turned out to be a good for nothing snake in the grass.

Then again, who’s to say they’re always forgotten?

The strongest memories survive, and perhaps those that don’t aren’t needed anymore. I’m not yet at the stage where I could walk away from the house and leave everything behind without a pang of regret, but at least now I could do it with far fewer suitcases.

What about you? What’s your relationship to stuff and all those tangible memories?