It's spring cleaning time at our house. Every year we tend to look through our kids rooms, find the clothes they don't fit, and the toys they've outgrown, along with the accumulated grownup junk, and drive it over to donate and sometimes sell. Stuff accumulates, and for some reason it's hard to let go of. I have a box in our garage and it's filled with power adapters to electronic things that have long since passed. And to make matter's worse, my parents downsized, and I ended up with my father's box of power adapters, too. And I'm scared to throw them out, because I know on the day I throw it out, there will be a piece of equipment that needs a specific power adapter that can only be found in those boxes.
Fear keeps me from throwing that stuff away. There's also stuff I cling to in my head: Old relationships that have long outlived their usefulness that have turned into public arguments on social media. Agonizing over the actions of a prior version of myself that I've long made amends for. Long-standing resentments that I can get present with and let go. These things are just like those power adapters -- sitting in the box, ready to be hooked up to their phantom electronics, but serving no purpose other than to take up some space in my head. It's time to let them go.
