There is a cardboard box on the top shelf of my closet that I have moved four times without opening. I know approximately what is in it — old journals, a broken watch that belonged to my grandfather, some letters, a coffee mug from a church I served twenty years ago that no longer exists. I know this because I peeked once, sometime around the third move, then folded the flaps back down and slid it into the new closet like a secret I wasn’t ready to deal with.
I don’t think I’m unusual in this. Most of us have a box like that somewhere.
There’s a habit I’ve noticed in myself, and I suspect it’s broader than just me: I hold onto things not because I use them or even love them, but because letting go feels like a small betrayal. The mug isn’t just a mug. It’s a Tuesday morning in a church kitchen, someone laughing, the smell of bad coffee and good community. Throwing it out feels like throwing that out, like I’d be agreeing that it no longer matters.
But of course it still matters. The question is whether keeping the mug is what makes it matter.
I’ve come to think that hoarding objects is sometimes a failure of trust — a suspicion that memory alone can’t carry the weight of what we’ve loved. So we surround ourselves with artifacts, evidence, receipts. As if the past might vanish entirely if we stopped clutching its props.
There’s a tenderness in this impulse, and I don’t want to be too hard on it. Grief is real. Attachment is human. The impulse to preserve what we’ve loved is not weakness — it’s loyalty of a kind. I think of Jacob limping away from Peniel, forever marked by what he’d wrestled with. Some things are supposed to leave a trace.
But I also think there is a difference between carrying something and being buried under it. Between honoring the past and refusing to let it be the past.
I’m going to open that box this summer. I’ve been telling myself this for two years, but this time I mean it. I think I’ll keep the watch, maybe the letters. The mug I’ll probably let go — not because the memory isn’t worth keeping, but because I’ve decided the memory doesn’t need a container.
Some things you carry in your hands. Some things you just carry. Learning to tell the difference is, I think, one of the quieter disciplines of a life well-lived.