digging in my boxes

this recent holiday vacation i went home to nj to go through belongings - in preparation for the sale of my childhood home. sniff. i wanted to review and purge review and purge review and purge.

so i read tons and tons of letters from highschool & college - apparently we were prolific handwriters. now i'm lazy and digital all the time. maybe i should add that to my list of 2005 resolutions.

in those boxes i found pieces of myself, details especially, that had completely slipped out of my ears. gone. it was as often embarassing as illuminating to relearn those microscopic parts of my relationships. i honestly couldn't read 1/3 of it because i was so annoyed at the mundane details. the other 2/3s, however, completely rocked me.
---
yesterday a new roomate moved in to my house here in sf and our home is in crazy mid-transition disarray. it's a good excuse to unearth some more of those relics of my past that i carry with me from home to home. rarely examined, often resented. so i dug out a big ass box of photographs from my studies/travels in zanzibar and ghana; icy cold minnesota skooling; awkward teenage postures of friends in jersey; new found post-graduate relief and confusion in boston and jersey again; some road travel to fill in the gaps.

lately my head and heart are yearning to reconnect with myself - my me beyond now, my me beyond the 400% zoom-ins that i often look through. in response it would seem that i'm getting dosed with historic perspectives. what's that saying? if we don't learn our history, we're doomed to repeat it. well these remembmerings have me pausing with a fresh contemplative stance - looking at what's to come. our language describes time as something with 3 parts - past present and future. my plunge in to the past brings a whole new openness of possibilities to the future, and thereby a new appreciation for right now.

who knew? i thought i was simply on a mission to reduce my belongings! now it seems i've gone and refreshed my memory chips.