It Ain't Worth The Stink

I've been watching "What the Bleep Do We Know" semi-compulsively over the last few days (if you've never seen it, stop reading this RIGHT NOW and go find a copy!!!!!). Love that film. Love how it stretches my brain into new and interesting shapes. Anyway...in a fabulous act of synchronicity, my pal Pam sent me a feng shui kit. A book, some crystals, a mirror. So I'm reading that, with the dialog from What the Bleep in the back of my head. And I'm realizing some things. It is in our nature, apparently, to acquire material stuff, and then drag it along with us. And what's more, we also accumulate the junk our ancestors collected, and that stuff is more... fraught... than the stuff we accumulate for ourselves. But the stuff is memorabilia, carried around for the purpose of evoking memory. Just ask anyone. As a characteristic of Life on Planet Earth, we human beings have glitches. We have bad days, worse days, catastrophic gut-wrenching moments. It happens. Just ask anyone. According to the biochemists, and the psychiatrists, your brain synapes wire to each other associatively. So if you associate something with someone, the memory synapse associated with the person co-wires to the synapse associated to the something. Which is to say... when you see the thing, you remember the person, and all the co-wiring that's associated with them. Good days, bad days, catastrophic, gut-wrenching days. Fascinatingly, the brain cannot tell the difference between something in storage in your head (memory), and something you're seeing. Which means that a flash of memory of a train wreck is the very same thing as being at the train wreck originally. So whenever you see your stuff, it's the same as reminding yourself of the drama associated with it. Which psychologically and biochemically speaking, means you are anchoring yourself to the drama of the past. With all that in mind, if I asked you if I should keep anything at all that reminds me of my ex, what would you say? You'd say hell no, wouldn't you? Anything at all that reminds me of him should be pitched with great enthusiasm, right? And yet, when I hold up the objects, and say, "should I ditch this?" people almost always tell me no. It's worth money. Or it's useful somehow. Or I might need it. Or whatever reason. And every time I look at those things, my body gets treated to a biochemical wash of, well, catastrophic gut-wrenching. So I am once again rampaging through my home like a tornado, getting rid of belongings. Things that have intrinsic value, but psychic stink. And it's weird how much lighter I feel, and I'm not even finished yet. I wonder how good it's going to feel when I'm done...