Since the new year, I have been on a cleaning kick. I cleaned the storage room behind the laundry room. I broke down all the empty boxes in the attic and rearranged the boxes that were left. I recycled three old computers, a non-working scanner, and an Epson RX-80 dot matrix printer. I categorized my cables and recycled the ones that only connect to computers or devices I no longer own. I rearranged the holiday decorations and threw out non-working Christmas lights. I grouped old baby clothes, cribs, safety gates, baby monitors, and infant car seats and started the process of selling them on Craigslist. I shredded any paperwork older than 7 years: rent payment receipts for apartments I don’t live in, statements for credit cards I don’t have, bank receipts for accounts long since closed. I even convinced my wife to recycle 37 empty shoe boxes.
In the back of the attic were two boxes, curiously labeled “Attachments,” a wry perversion of the Buddhist principle of the same name. These boxes were hastily taped shut almost 15 years ago; I have not opened them since. I have moved many times, and I have always carried these boxes with me. From my parents’ house, to my first apartment, to my second apartment, my third, my fourth, and finally my current house. Every physical move presents a unique opportunity to shed physical attachments, but these boxes have survived every chance I had to leave them behind.
On each such occasion — and on several occasions in between — I have asked myself under what circumstances I would be willing to discard them, or open them, or both. Lacking an answer, I have carried them through my entire adult life, waiting to understand why.
And then, while I was standing in the center of my new-found, meticulously organized attic, it hit me: I had been waiting for the facts inside these boxes to change. Of course facts do not change; only people change. And with that, I dumped them in the trash and hauled them to the curb, still unopened after all these years.
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© 2001–present Mark Pilgrim