Week 40: I want to declutter!

as the days leading up to my return fall away from me like grains of sand in a freshly overturned hour-glass, i've been using my precious time by packing. and i'm talking serious packing as i will be moving out of the camperdown apartment and in to someplace new. hence, everything important needs to go into boxes while all the junk gets thrown out.

although packing can be such a colossal pain in the metaphorical ass, somehow it bestows me with a faint sense of therapeutic calmness too. there is something oddly satisfying about storing all that you are worth into white boxes taped over and marked. it is akin to saying, there, all that i am is neatly packed up and stored - order has prevailed and then you end this monologue by giving yourself a well-deserved pat on the back.

furthermore, packing is always inevitably linked to clearing and cleaning. within these two days i have thrown away so much junk and crap and useless bits of paper that i'm amazed i even had a space to sleep in my room! and it is amazing the things you uncover while you go on a packing rampage.

just an hour ago, i unearthed a whole stack of letters dating back to a period of my life for which holds no sentimental value for me anymore. it was kind of comical, really, as i took each letter out and re-read them because i kept asking myself, oh wow, what was i thinking?! but i did read all of them. some made me laugh, some made me cringe and some just did not affect me emotionally at all - it felt like i was reading another paper churned out by Nature or the Marine Ecology-Progress Series. and it was a little bit scary when that happened because i was analysing the letter with a scientific mind as how i would with a paper discussing about the implications of climate change. every word ran through my mind twice and i was trying to pick up the flaws and limitations in each sentence.

but the bottomline is - these letters hold nothing for me anymore. and i really want to discard them because all that they are now are just dead space, or rather, baggage. but then again, i don't know if i should, because it actually seems rather cruel - and for all the times that people (yes, including my mother, oh dear lord!) have called me heartless, cold, uncaring, unemotional and unfeeling, i actually DO have some semblance of conscience ok? i'd like to keep them - but what's the use of keeping them? i don't want to spend my whole life carting them from one place to another when they obviously are of no use to me anymore just because it feels like 'the right thing to do'. fuck that. the obvious and apparent 'right thing to do' right now is to declutter my life and remove as much junk and crap as possible.

ok thanks. i think i just made up my mind for me. i was hoping to open this up as a general question i.e. should i or should i not retain those letters even though they no longer hold anymore sentimental value however retaining them seems the 'decent' thing to do - DISCUSS but i think i've pretty much decided what i should do. ok. back to packing.