The Little Things: Boiling it Down

This week, my goals are to boil things down. It's not that I want less "stuff", because I think we're doing pretty decently on the "stuff" front. It's that I want less "stuff-in-boxes-in-my-basement".

So I'm boiling it down: sorting through all the things that have gone un-sorted for nearly four years, throwing out the stuff that I was holding onto because I felt guilty and/or pack-ratting and distilling things into less things.

The toughest stuff to boil down so far has been memory boxes. We had five. Five boxes of memories, with everything from Congratulations! It's a Boy! letters to John's parents circa '89, to my diary from age 8 (hilarious, by the way) and drawings, paintings, and dozens on dozens on dozens on hundreds of letters from 16 year-old John to 16 year-old Sam and vice-versa (we pseudo-dated at camp, so to keep our eyes on Jesus we didn't really talk much... everything went on paper after the campers were in bed), and GO transit passes from visiting each other, John's earliest photography, and save the dates, RSVP cards from our wedding and friends' (Anne&Pim '08 what what), drawings from Jordan to John to Jerrad to Brock and back again, and (my favourite) an incredible movie script by Grade 5 John & his Grade 5 friend James (who now actually works on movies)... the list goes on.

It was good and hard to get rid of some of that. To choose the coolest painting or two from when I was 6. To throw out Sweet 16 birthday cards. Really, really bad poetry... finally destroyed. Stuff like that.

Because we had to consider: what will mean something to us in twenty years?

What will mean something to our grandkids? What will share stories of our life? What will accurately reflect who we were, not who we wanted to be? Because we, as people, keep changing. John and I are different people than when we met, or even from when we married. And I think that's awesome - to preserve our evolution.

And it's been fun to decide what to keep and what to toss, because hopefully one day, The Caterpillar will be sorting through it all with her grandkids, mostly in a state of confusion (much of it is a collection of inside jokes). And we'll have sorted through the same time capsule, reminiscing over old jokes or bad haircuts and loving it all.

And for the record, here is what life actually does look like, lately.