Memories and Notebooks

Now is all you have.

I was going to type ‘memories and regrets’, but my fat old fingers came up with ‘memories and egrets’, which I think is a great visual.  Who doesn’t love a tall bird that walks in the marshes on stilts and spears fishes?  What a great example of specificity and evolution.  That’s better than those birds that eat bugs off of wildebeest.

Memories and egrets.

Anyhow.  My wife was at home today.  Sometimes she goes on cleaning binges.  She was working her way through one of the numerous piles of junk left over in our house, like piles of rocks left by receding glaciers.

The glaciers in this case are two grown children and a full life of family and work and life that has swept over us in the last 30+ years.

She ran into a few boxes of my stuff.  These were the boxes from the office of a job I was in for 5-6 years.   I’ve had a few jobs in my life.  I’ve had a few offices.  I’ve learned that these jobs, and work in general, work for money, is ephemeral at best.

As cynical as it sounds; don’t collect too much stuff in your office and be ready to move.

The office these boxes came from was a nice office. It was a big office.  I had a door.  I had a window where ethe landscapers would come and bother my calls with their weed-whackers on Tuesday mornings.

It was a satellite office. With just me and a couple other people.  Which made it very peaceful.  I had a big desk that I backed up against a wall where I hung my stuff.  My marathon medal rack, my quilt that my mom made me.  I had a bookcase full of books and notebooks. A few knickknacks.

When I left that office, I threw a bunch of stuff away.  At least I was smart enough to do that.  I knew I wouldn’t need any of the job-specific stuff.  You never do.  I knew from previous jobs that this was not a home, this was a place to work.   A temporary place.  A way station on the silk road of career and work.

I packed up my books and my brickbat.  Into old copy paper boxes.  Threw it in my truck and walked away.  I had a lot of books.  I’m a book guy.  I brought them home and dropped them into an open spot on the floor in the living room.  They stacked neatly like large bricks in a temporary wall.

These boxes from 4 years ago were the ones my wife ran into in her cleaning expedition.  What do you do with stuff like this?  I don’t have an office anymore.  I mean I have a home office.  Some of this brickbat might eventually find a home there.  But, as of today it was in the way of the great clean.

Not sure how this works in the modern times, but in my career, you had notebooks.  You carried a notebook with you to take notes.  I had maybe a dozen of these notebooks of various shapes and sizes from my time at this company.

Notebooks of 3 years as a struggling startup, and then another more than 5 years as an acquired business unit.

Paging through these notebooks is fruitless.  They are full of cryptic notes about meetings with companies, prospects, partners, employees, and bosses.  None of that stuff is important anymore.

All those people were acquaintances.  They weren’t friends.  They weren’t family.

The notebooks are also full of first drafts of the articles, many of which would become topics of discussion on my blog, or podcast – or in one of my books.  Most of these, at least the ones that have any life, are captured digitally somewhere.

There may also be the odd poem.  Which is cringeworthy at best for an old boomer like me.

There are also endless ideas.  Ideas for businesses and books and projects.  I’m a big one for scribbling stuff out onto paper as a way to see if it comes alive – or recedes back into the greyness of thought.

Of course, there are the lists.  The To-Do lists.  The projects.  The self-improvement lists.   Endless attempts to organize my life around some defining purpose.  I’m past the point where I really care about any of those lists.   There was never the big ‘aha!’ moment when something int hose lists changed my life.  Those lists got me through a day, or a week or a project.  I leaned on them like a walking stick on a muddy trail.

I had not meant for this post to sound so morose.  It is not intended to be.  My intent was to share some insight with you.  To reenforce the fact that life is short.  Moments matter.  All you really have is today.  That things at work that seem so important, are in fact, not important at all.  In a year, or two years, or three years the sting of whatever vexes you today – you won’t even remember it.

There was a mild sadness when I looked at this stack of notebooks and made a quick decision to toss them all in the recycle bin.  It was an easy decision.  Maybe 10 years ago I’d keep them, and never look at them.  To keep them would be like collecting all the dust and dirt from every road you’ve ever traveled.

All these things, these interactions are part of the fabric of your life.  There’s no reason to hoard them.  They are with you.  To hang on to them will bury you, bury your spirit under a crushing weight of baggage. Let them go.

Be here, now.  Look to what you can do with today.

Like Marie Kondo would say, maybe you can thank them, give them a little blessing and then send them on their way, because your life must go on.  Their time has passed.  You can celebrate that time but not by dragging the cardboard boxes of the past with you into your celebration of the future.