Simplify Your Life: Sentimental Items
October 31, 2009 7 Comments
Our lives are complicated. Fortunately there are aspects which we are able to control. In a mini-series called Simplify Your Life I will briefly discuss methods you can use in order to simplify your daily life.
Chances are you have a box tucked away in the corner of a closet filled with memorabilia from your life. It is filled with years or even decades of Stuff from your past. Love letters from your high school sweetheart, photos from Spring Break in Cancún, old diaries, locks of hair from your child’s first haircut. All reminders of yesterday. Each item is loaded with emotions. You would never consider parting ways with any of the objects found in that box…until now!
Reaching a point where you are able to separate yourself from the emotional attachment and are able to let go of those old items is the hardest part. These things are no longer simply an object, they contain real emotion. Reading your old love letters brings back a flood of passion. Sifting through your old photos turns into an emotional rollercoaster as you reminisce about the great times you had & the memories of loved ones passed. Getting rid of this Stuff means forever losing those memories, those emotions. It is like throwing out your identity, piece by piece.
How do you separate yourself from the emotional attachment these items possess?
When I was in high school I found an old cardboard box which I began filling with letters from my girlfriend. Soon I was adding all sorts of sentimental items to the box. There were birthday cards, small trinkets, photos of friends and from my travels. It didn’t take long for the box to start filling up with my memories.
After dragging the box around with me for years and adding Stuff regularly, it was time for a bigger box. As I began transferring my Stuff to its new home I realized that a few of the things contained in that old cardboard box no longer held relevance in my life. I was able to let these things go but the majority of Stuff made it safely into the upgraded box.
It wasn’t until I began seeking a minimalist lifestyle that I dared to work up the courage to analyze the contents of that box from a more critical perspective. I pulled the box out of its resting place in the corner of my closet and began clearing it out. There were plenty of things that I had no problem getting rid of and there were other items that I felt like I couldn’t part with. What I struggled with the most were the old love letters and the photos from my life.
As I sorted through the box I thought about my past, my relationship and I realized that these items were holding me back. They were causing me to be stuck in the past. How could I live today, love today, when my emotions were sealed inside of that box? I tossed out all of the old love letters and separated myself from the last of the emotional strings still attached this old relationship.
The photos of my life, my family, my friends, my travels were next. Everyone always says that photos are the most important thing in their lives, and mine included. If I had to guess I probably had thousands of photos. How could I possibly get rid of these?
I took the project head-on and started sorting the photos. The duplicates and photos of “nothing” were put into a pile that would ultimately find its way into the garbage. The photos of memorable value were scanned and saved to my computer, then the majority were tossed along with the rest of the photos. I decided to keep the photos from my childhood. In order to protect the digital photos from being lost in case of a faulty computer, I uploaded them to an online host. Now I still have the photos to look at and enjoy but they are not sitting in a box fading with time or at risk of being lost in a fire or other natural disaster. I have access to them from any Internet connection.
I managed to reduce the amount of Stuff in my box to practically nothing. I kept my Diploma & my Degree and a few random things which I was unable to part with but I managed to entirely eliminate all of the clutter and reduced the emotional baggage that box held. It was a lot of work & I separated myself from a lot of memories, some good & some bad but in the end I feel free from my past, more able to live in the present rather than constantly clinging to the past.
Read more about How to Let Go of Possessions.
About Steven
How exactly were these sentimental items holding you back? They didn’t stop you from living your life, especially if they resided in a box most of the time. By scanning photos and then throwing the physical images away you aren’t really getting rid of the sentimental item. It is just putting them into a different format. How is it OK to keep the photos, do they not also hold you back? I guess I need some “holding back” clarification.
I personally can’t follow you on this one. You think people should move on from the past, I think you might have been imagining someone who peaked at 18 and relives their old football games or something. I feel that some sentimental items remind you of people who are no longer living and reside only in the past. If an item enhances my memories of a person or time then I would choose to keep it. What do I need a few more cubic feet of space for, that is more important than that?
For me, getting rid of the old love letters was the biggest move I made in seperating myself from the past. By keeping them around, even in a box tucked away in the closet, the memories contained within them lived on. Purging the tangible reminders of that relationship allowed me to move on emotionally from the strings still attached to that period of my life & in some ways I feel that by keeping this emotional attachment I was preventing myself from really being involved in my current relationship somehow.
By scanning my photos I am allowing myself to live lighter, less encumbered by material goods while preserving the memories those photos contained. I am not trying to argue that we should seperate ourselves from our memories but rather the Stuff surrounding those memories. It isn’t the Stuff that we are worried about losing but the memories contained within that Stuff. To some people, our most valued objects might be little more than rubbish but in our minds these objects are packed with emotions, some good & others not good.
If minimalism is not something you strive to accomplish in your own life then a box in the corner filled with your life memorabilia won’t be a big deal to you. If, like myself, you are a person who wants to live a life as free from material possessions as you are willing (not able, per se because I could easily go with less) then finding alternative ways to store your Stuff (in this case, photos uploaded to an online host) is a good solution. Especially when your photo collection is overwhelming and disorganized and filled with “Nothing Photos”. It is easy to scan them, burn them to a disc to protect them & upload them to an online photo host to further protect them from loss. What happens if you come home to find your house has burnt to the ground and those photos are now ashes?
Letting go of an item that contains sentimental value is a challenge that not many people are willing to undertake, and I understand that. There are MANY reasons why NOT to disconnect yourself from these things but at the end of the day, it is still just Stuff. Your memories still live on. I wrote this article from my own perspective of what I found while I went through the process of eliminating the Stuff from my life. By letting the Stuff go, I was able to move forward emotionally in some cases and was able to retain the memories in other areas of my life.
I don’t expect everyone to feel the same way as I do about this and when the “problem” is small it may not be any inconvenience but what happens when you find yourself with a house FULL of sentimental items that you can’t part with? Loving someone is different than loving a photo of them. Having a photo as a reminder of your love for that person is fine but you don’t love the photo, you love the person in the photo. I think that is really the point I am trying to make with this article. Your emotion involved with the item isn’t for the item itself but the feeling or memory attached to that item.
If you don’t see the reason to minimize your sentimental possessions, then by all means keep your Stuff. For me & what I hope to accomplish in my life I will not be able to drag along a box (or multiple boxes) and it doesn’t make sense for me to keep these things. They are just things, and like I said before, it isn’t the Stuff that I love, it is the memories.
Thanks for the detailed reply. I have been meaning to scan my photos for quite some time. You make it sound so easy. I think if I ever get around to doing it I may struggle with getting rid of the printed photos. I am a very cheap person and know how much it costs to get photos printed, and I wouldn’t want to pay for something I already paid for. As a realist I have to admit that I probably wouldn’t need photos printed out for anything….it’s not like they’ll be filling any albums, those are becoming pretty much extinct. Everything is online. I recommend you backup photos your friends may have of you or your travels on facebook. More than a fire, I worry that mine or one of my friends accounts could be deleted and all those uploaded pictures lost.
I agree wholeheartedly about getting rid of stuff from past relationships. Even if it ended well, those items don’t really seem to help and definitely can “hold you back.” I personally don’t feel much of a need to live more minimally than I already do. I have moved 9 times in the last 7 years and I think I have gotten rid of almost everything extra that I had. Extra by my standards anyway…
Besides sentimentality, the biggest difficulty I have with getting rid of things is my “frugality” (as noted by the saving of photos). I tend to ask myself the classic “Will I ever need this again?” Most of the time you can’t be sure and so I always default towards keeping something rather than having to need it and pay for it again in a few years time. I am just that cheap. And of course, there are always the things that beget things. Anyone with a kitchen full of appliances knows that you can’t just buy a breadmaker without having committed to buying loads of ingredients. If you could write an article about breaking this cycle of “things needing things” I’d definitely read it. But then again, perhaps it’s not a problem you’ve had.
My definition of frugality is basically buying only what you need, and spending your money on things that are important to you. It doesn’t equate with cheap. I consider myself frugal but I am also more than willing to spend a lot of money on a trip (of course, done as financially efficient as possible) or an expensive pair of pants or the extra cost of purchasing local foods. I no longer spend a lot of money on CDs or DVDs because I don’t value them.
One thing I have found about the “will I ever use this again” argument is to think about your past use of that item. When is the last time you needed the item & what do you realistically think will be the future use of that item? If you are still unable to part with it, try this method: Find a box & fill it with all of the items in question. Seal it up and post date it one year from today. If in a year’s time you haven’t had to open the box to remove anything, get rid of it without opening it. If you had to use an item in the box, then by all means, keep that item but the remaining items are probably things you don’t actually need.
The same technique can be done with clothes. If you have a lot of clothes, create 2 areas to store them. Start with all of your clothes in the first area and as you wear them, return them to the second area. After a year, if there are still clothes in the first area, you probably aren’t going to wear them. Sell or donate them.
As for your idea of keeping an item because you spent money on it, this is called the myth of a sunk cost. Basically you feel like you can’t part with something because you spent your money on it, and therefore you associate the item with the money you spent & probably the effort you made to earn the money. It seems like a waste of money to get rid of the item. The money is already gone. Keeping an item that you don’t need isn’t saving you any money. Whether you keep the item or get rid of it, that money is gone & you can’t get it back. The closest you may come to getting your money back would be to try to sell it. I’ve learned this lesson the hard way. I sold most of my DVDs and CDs for pennies on the dollar and it was painful to think about all of the money I wasted but it was a real moment of awakening for me. I haven’t bought a DVD since then, about a year ago. As a matter of fact, I haven’t bought much of anything. I spend my money on things that I value, traveling and irreplaceable experiences.
Minimalism is a long and emotional process to work towards. I’ve been at it for almost a year now and I’m far from where I’d like to be. It could be as simple as tossing everything in the trash but that isn’t how I want to do things. I want to eliminate anything extraneous and keep the things that bring some sort of joy to my life. I don’t want to live in a cave but I want to be able to live as lightly as possible. It is easier to travel, to move, to wander not to mention how overconsumption affects our planet.
I don’t feel like I’m sacrificing anything by living this way and I’m actually much more able to enjoy the things I do have in my life. I’m less concerned with what I don’t have than I am with enjoying the things that I do…something I think many people struggle with.
Scanning pictures is easy once you get started :) Its getting past thing “thinkin’ ’bout it” stage that is the challenge.
So you heard of this guy? Who sold all his stuff including his degrees? Seems to have similar mindset as you. http://www.lloydsexperiment.com
Actually, I hadn’t heard of this but I would disagree that we have similar mindsets. I’m not saying that I disagree with his opinions (what I’ve read of his thoughts seem honest) or what he is doing but rather my perspective is slightly different. Some people become slaves to their Stuff by acquiring too much and at the same time I think people can become slaves to their Stuff by focusing too much on minimalism. It is about finding a balance between extremes where it is possible to find freedom. Obsession with buying or with minimizing your material possessions is still obsession in either direction and you are no less free from your Stuff by not having any than you are by having a house full of clutter. It is all about your perspective and relationship with your Stuff more than it is about how much or how little you own. My focus on minimizing material possessions is to clear out the excess, the Stuff that provides no utility or value, and allow room for Stuff that brings enjoyment.
Thanks for the link, it is interesting.
I liked your article a lot. I’ve been trying to let go of some sentimental items and have been wanting to really reduce my possessions and let go of the past. It’s nice to know that other people think the same way as I do about possessions and minimalism. I am still struggling with a few things I have and I still find it silly that I would hold on to small trinkets for over 30 years. It’s just stuff!