Someone commented on my last post, asking why I throw my old notebooks away. A better question would be, "Why should I keep them?" After all, normally when I write I am putting on paper the thoughts that are important at the moment. Like this one, which keeps popping up when people find out I don't keep my old writings. I find that this is a good forum to say my peice on why I decide to throw out my collections of random thoughts and feelings, since I can just give out the address and people can read it rather than having to tell the same old story.
For starters, paper takes up room in an otherwise cluttered closet. A couple years ago I was moving and got down to the bottom of my closet, where all the old shoe boxes of folders, notebooks and assorted peices of paper were stored. There was an entire garbage bag of paper there that could have been thrown out years ago, saving me time now. This brings up another point. I lived in that house for three years and in that time I never opened these boxes and looked at anything in them. Why? Probably because I forgot about them. They weren't really that important; probably why they ended up in the bottom of the closet anyway. Now in my closet I have another box of paper started that sets there and collects dust. I don't look in it either unless I am trying to find something else that I have misplaced. I just haven't cleaned it out yet.
While I was going through the boxes I was curious and looked at some of the things I had written. These were the collected works of my late teens and early twenty's, and they didn't apply to me anymore. They were filled with the angst of a young man who hated the world he lived in. Why would I want to keep these concrete images of my past? I remember it well enough as it is. So I threw them out, as I do now. Life is too short to be dwelling in the past. I did that for a while and missed out on the present; that's probably why I was so depressed when I wrote those things in the first place. Now I just focus on the now and I'm much happier for it. I have memories in my head, I don't need them to be written down for me, yet.
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1 comment:
I have found it interesting to read old things that I wrote as a teenager. I get some of your points about not keeping the stuff, but it seems like it's almost devaluing (sp?) it. That's just my opinion. Thanks for sharing why you don't keep them.
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