Cabinets Drawers of the Soul

Last week when I was poking around an area of work, I came across something that was almost 12 months out of date.  It was not obvious and had certainly been missed in periodic cleanups, as it was placed in a cabinet out of sight and due to a number of factors (personnel turnover, lack of use of the area) it simply was never discovered.  I pointed it out to someone, where it was promptly removed.

It reminded in general how little a fan I am of such things as drawers, cabinets, and closets.

Why?  They would seem to be terrible useful storage area, right?  We are always in need of additional space to store something or other, especially things that we don't always need right away.  And who is against organization, right?

All true. I am freakish on my own organization, especially at work, to the point of maybe I have a problem.  Clean and organized is the way I like my workspace.  No, my complaint against the innocuous storage device is simply that it enables us to keep that which might better not be stored.

We often seem willing and able to place something to the side which we fully believe we will use one day.  Waste not, want not, as the saying goes.  But things change, people change, priorities change.  Suddenly the thing that was so critical is now consigned to the dustbin of history, and things have moved on.  But having placed things away in cabinets and drawers, they are now out of sight and therefore out of mind.  It becomes a question of having the time to go back and sift through the detritus of time or simply move on with what is important now.

But to be fair, do we not do the same things with our souls?

We all bear pockets within ourselves of items not dealt with, relationships that ended badly or we simply just placed into limbo, of interests that we never really stopped caring about but really stopped doing, of feelings that we simply had no time for (or couldn't deal with).  And so, rather than go through the hard work of either organizing and incorporating them into our lives or simply disposing of them, we temporize:  we put them into the storage areas of our souls.

We never really deal with such things of course.  We find them every now and again as we go through our daily lives:  the anger at something that suddenly rages and we don't really understand why, the recurring interest in something we gave up years ago and was hardly healthy for us then, the thoughts of people that drift into our lives.  It's as if we were going through cabinets again, randomly finding things.

I don't wonder if use this storage device the way a pack rat stores things, that somehow these things are the potential lifeline in case of an event which may never happen.  Or is simply the denial of the life that we actually have, an act of resistance in keeping those things which we once held dear and have no hope of or ability to do?  Or perhaps we're simply lazy:  we've learned to clean our living areas, but not clean up our lives.

That's what it comes to, of course.  Cleaning out our lives.  Like a facility cleaning day, where everyone takes a day to simply clean out the contents of every drawer and cabinet and closet.  Get the garbage bins, get some pizza, start sorting through the detritus of some number of years, keeping that which is important or relevant, disposing of that which is not longer so or simply expired.

Because like most everything else, lots of things in our lives have expiration dates.  Keeping them out of sight prevents us from disposing of them, lightening our load, and moving on.