In every significant downsizing project, there comes a point when you look around and see a few piles that stump you.
They don’t immediately scream “keep me forever as a prized treasure” or “toss me right the heck now” or you would have dealt with them already.
Instead, you’ve got yourself a stand-off. Which usually means those piles are trying to tell you something. Which means if you ask the right questions and listen to your intuition closely, that pile will tell you exactly what to do.
Like “Helena” who had carefully saved all the disturbing letters from her mentally ill mother who had died a few years before. While she almost gleefully let go of 30 years’ worth of stuff, she couldn’t quite figure out what to do with these.
So I encouraged her to sit with them—not to read them, but to assemble them in a pile and quietly sit with them until she had some clear emotions about it.
After about ten minutes—she later said she got the intuitive hit immediately but wanted to be sure before she acted—she knew it was time to let them go.
But tossing them in the trash wouldn’t be the right kind of satisfying. Instead, she took them out to her barbeque grill and lit them on fire. Because while she’d loved her mother, those letters were a painful reminder of the dark and twisted times she’d just as soon forget.
Here’s the thing: on some level, we all know what the right decision is for keeping, donating or disposing of our memories.
The trick is to get quiet and listen closely to what they tell you.
