One of the things (my obsessions date very long back in time) I 've been wanting to do for quite a while now was to clear out the things in the storage room we have at the basement at my parents' place. By the time I got to live here in Lamia again for a few weeks, I realised that I also needed to do that at home with all my old boxes.
It's just amazing how once upon a time there were five of us living comfortably in this house, and nowadays, if a third person comes home, other than my parents, it's hard to fit anything anywhere. So the need was obvious, I had to get everyone on board and so my obsession came to reality, getting the four of us (parents and sister) in this procedure of clearing everything up.
It's shocking how many things I used to keep when I was younger. They range from receipts of things I bought, shows I attended, leaflets (a lot of which I actually never got to read), boarding passes, A LOT of AIESEC memorabilia (I have it filtered down to 'just' four boxes now), and of course clothes I no longer fit into, cassettes (= more than 200) I no longer listen to (there is no cassette player at my folks' place at the moment), letters sent to me and postcards, etc etc. Going through that and deciding to get rid of a lot of stuff is a painful but interesting experience. I found a lot of things, scribblings and notes that I no longer could remember what they were about and a lot of other objects that made me laugh or even get close to crying. In the end I even developped a theory about this entire process.
I figured that you can't just do this every couple of years, go through all your old belongings, if your goal is to get rid of stuff and gain some extra space availability at home. You need to do it on a 10 year basis. This way the emotional attachment on alot of things has really gone away, and you can keep 'the most meaningful ones' if this phrase makes any sense at all.
In any case this was a very refreshing experience, and also there was alot of family teambuilding around it as I got everyone at home to do the same. Well, in the beginning they all hated me (esp. my sister, who was only visiting for the weekend and she found the house almost like having been hit by a tornado, filled with boxes and papers...) but in the end we all enjoyed giving our house a facelift...
Another conclusion/theory after these last few days: There's a lot of things that I use to keep in order to be reminded of past events, now they are very few and related to the memories I really wanna keep for a long time in life, not forgetting about the rest, but well, you have to free yourself from a lot of your past to move on to the future. Was nice revisiting all that in any case, feels good :) The memories never go to trash, no matter how many things reminding of them you throw to the trash bin.
