From where I sit perched on my bed (or rather slouched on my bed) the space to my left is remarkably clean & neat while the space to my right is cluttered & dusty.
I had the worthy goal today of doing a blitz on my room, leaving the whole thing sparkly clean & smelling faintly of pine sol, but I really only got to half of it. Well, actually, more like a quarter of it. But, because that quarter is currently looking so darn good, I'm not going to dwell to much on my failings. (The room is 1/4 clean, not 3/4 messy, after all.)
What always slows me down in the cleaning process is my tendency to pause over papers I'm going through. I almost never am able to grab a stack & then uncerimoniously dump it without first filing through each sheet to read what I've written there.
For instance, today I found several old letters from Cathy written within a year, I think, of when I moved from California. Holy schnikes, were we into Post Scripts! And, I could reiterate all the crushes she listed for my reading pleasure, but I will refrain. *Wink, wink!*
I also spent a lot of time going through my mission papers. I had notes saved from all my MTC classes & I still have every single letter anybody wrote to me on my mission. (They're still all hanging out in plastic bags. I'm going to put them all in a binder (or two) but for now, they'll languish in a bin under my bed until the next 3-day weekend.) I also went through binders full of stuff, papers talking about strategies to teach people I vaguely remember, and the precious written testimonies of the couple I helped teach in my second area who have (against all odds) remained strong in the faith.
I found pictures from high school and my freshman & sophmore years of college (in which I wore this really awful black cap a lot) and I couldn't help thinking that I've really done a poor job of keeping in contact with the people I knew then, and most of what was important to me during those days has faded into the back of my mind now.
It was kind of strange--I was remembering being someone that I just am not anymore, and it threw me off a little. I wondered if I had stayed true to myself, if I had changed and left the old me completely behind, or if I'd just made some improvements (and necessarily a few setbacks). I hope it's mostly the latter, although I felt a distinct feeling of disconnection from my previous self, almost as if I were reviewing the life of someone else entirely.
And, while I'm completely caught up in the hopes & fears of today, I wonder what the me of 10 or 15 years from now will think of the me today?
I hope she'll like me.
I hope I'll like her.
4 comments:
I LOVE LOVE LOVE going through old stuff and throwing things away. In fact, I did a little of that myself yesterday. It was happy. And now my husband and I have a clean, organized closet and a box of things to go to Goodwill.
Yay! There's almost nothing more satisfying than getting rid of a lot of nonessentials. Although I didn't have anything for DI, our hungry little trash can is now...well...full.
I totally relate to your thoughts on change. I often wonder what I'll be like in a decade, and what my past self would think of the way I've turned out so far. I particularly relate to the part about focusing on different things than you used to.
In high school and early college, I focused so much energy on being DIFFERENT!!!, because being normal seemed insufferably boring. Years later, I still have my quirks (I own a spinning wheel, for pity's sake), and I still feel a peculiar draw toward people who've read LOTR more than once, but overall I'm fine with being more mainstream. I find most people relate to me better, and vice versa, and that has become more valuable to me than the vague goal of being unique. I seem to manage that ok without the extra effort, anyway.
Thanks for getting me thinking about change and the reasons behind it. The subject had been tugging at my mind for a while, but sometimes I don't really explore an idea until I sit down and write to someone about it.
That's one reason why I blog. It makes me think.
Urm. Sort of.
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