life as understood

In the basement of my parents' home, there is a room called "the bat cave." It is so named for its proclivity to perfect darkness. There's not so much as a digital clock to light the pillowcase in soft fluorescent green. Pitch black. It's the ideal guest room for breakfast haters. And right now it's filled with junk. My junk.

In less than a month, we're moving to California, placing my parents' home at a considerable distance for who knows how long. So when we stayed there this past weekend, I spent some time in the bat cave, sorting through box after box of old memories.

This practice of sorting through past personal relics is something we all do from time to time, most often with the noble objective (as was mine) of throwing things away. After all, that's what you do with old junk that piles up in the guest room. What if some weary Elijah needs to stay there for the first time in years? I'm not saying this sacrifice of past knowledge in favor of future uncertainty is wrong. It's just hard for me.

From a young age, I've had a difficult time throwing things away--toys, papers, anything that has specific days, places, or people attached. I assume it's lethophobia, the fear of forgetting, which must loom large in me. I've been blessed with an unusually sharp memory, but even the most vivid stories and sensations from the past generally only surface with the help of some physical cue. And as bizarrely painful as it can be to sort through my own joyful youth, I crave those stories and sensations. I love to remember. I imagine I'm no different than many in that respect. It's human to, once in a while, go through old drawers, closets, boxes of physical cues. The ironic thing, of course, is that we only acknowledge these cues, these artifacts, when laden with the task of thinning out their ranks. But are these memories really only useful to us when we're consciously cycling through them, deciding which ones to destroy? Which ones no longer represent whom we want to be?

A couple of months ago, while doing research on organizational culture for a project at work, I came across a scholarly article on non-verbal symbols which communicate subconsciously to employees and customers. The article served its purposes well, but it also surprised me with a line that turned out to be much more profound than was possibly intended. It hasn't left my mind since. It said, "there is no looking without a frame through which to see."

One of the first lessons taught in English class is on point of view. Truth, we learn, is relative to the speaker. And yet, this lesson is easily forgotten when discussing politics, religion, even sports. Each of us sees through his own completely unique frame--a frame that colors everything we observe in life, and each of our opinions.

So as I sat cross-legged on the blue carpet of the bat cave, surrounded by my boxes of memories and experiences, it came to me that these relics are probably the clearest physical representation on the planet of who I am as a person. These relics--unwittingly collected and created over 25 years--constitute the most palpable, graspable frame I have, the explanation of who I am today, and why.

And yet, even realizing that, I remained successful in my initial task to find things to throw away. I threw away old sweaters, cards my friend made me in elementary school, and page after page of scribbles demonstrating my near-clinical obsession with the Utah Jazz and the NBA. I made the conscious decision that the memories connected with those artifacts were not worth precious bat cave space. Those experiences will remain part of my frame forever, I suspect, but without the physical reminders, any hope of connecting those pasts with any particular present may be lost. For whatever reason, that was evidence I was willing to destroy. I did not throw away a Valentine's Day card from my 5-year-old sister calling me, in crooked handwriting, her best friend.

If I disappear, and those boxes are all that remain to draw sense out of a complex human life, I want that to be part of it. Maybe by keeping it, that card and its happy association will assume a slightly larger percentage of the frame through which I see as well. I suppose there's some sense of hope in the idea that we can shape and refine our own frames over time, whether or not that action is accomplished by choosing what and what not to throw away.

I suppose this long, over-thought musing on throwing things away demonstrates pretty well why I'm so bad at it. Despite all this soul-searching, I admit it's probably indeed best not to think about it too much, or else nothing will ever get thrown away and the bat cave will stand as a giant, faceless shrine to my laziness and/or sentimentality instead of whatever I'd like it to be. I guess there's always a balance.