What are you holding onto?

While reading A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel by Amor Towles, my husband showed me a passage that resonated for the work of Spirit & Space:

From the earliest age, we must learn to say good-bye to friends and family…It is part of the human experience that we are constantly gripping a good fellow by the shoulders and wishing him well, taking comfort from the notion that we will hear word of him soon enough.

But experience is less likely to teach us how to bid our dearest possessions adieu. And if it were to? We wouldn’t welcome the education. For eventually we come to hold our dearest possessions more closely than we hold our friends. We carry them from place to place, often at considerable expense and inconvenience…all the while, allowing memories to invest them with greater and greater importance. This armoire, we are prone to recall, is the very one in which we hid as a boy; and it was these silver candelabra that lined our table on Christmas Eve…Until we imagine that these carefully preserved possessions might give us genuine solace in the face of a lost companion.

But, of course, a thing is just a thing.

What is it about our “dearest possessions” that makes it so hard to let go? Even if you never use something, don’t even particularly like it…even if it’s been sitting in a cupboard out of view for decades…it may still be hard to let go.

Will that trinket, that memento, that thing you hold so dear bring joy to your heart? If so, pull it out of the cupboard and find a special place for it. Will it provide solace in loss? Then keep it tucked away until the time you need it.

But keep in mind, too, that we can’t take it all with us. At some point we have to let go. Holding onto too many things from the past can make it hard to welcome the future, the person you are becoming. Because we are all still becoming.

What are you holding onto? Is it time to lighten the load?