Empty Sunday mornings are pretty good days to do some tidying.
I’ve accumulated so many bits of paper in the last few years that it has started to overflow. My office space has become generally noisy, to the point where the clutter has become a mainstay on desk spaces.
A tidy-up has been very much overdue. And whilst I would like to pretend that I have such saintly energy that I just simply decided to tidy, the truth was that I pushed myself into it. Last night, I spent about an hour looking for my old passport. Turns out, I needed to find an old visa number stamped on it.
It took me about an hour of searching. And of course, it was at the back of the bottom drawer, more or less where I expected it to be. But it took me three goes of searching to find it, since it was buried between so many random bits of paper.
I left half the papers on the floor. I had made it so messy that I forced my own hand in needing to tidy it up this morning.
Whenever we go through our period of clear-out, we usually get hits of nostalgia. I was going through a lot of random printed documents, old letters, work info and other bits and pieces from the past.
The last time I did a similar exercise a few years ago, I remember being filled with a lot of emotional energy when I came across different things. I remember finding an old business card of my time in the UK Government. It had an emotional impact, as I suddenly remembered all those fun and bizarre stories of my time working there.
This time, I felt little. In fact, I was fairly systematic and was done within 45 minutes. I got rid of about 90% of the papers, saving only a very set amount which I would either need or had some sort of reason to be kept.
I think this reflects my shifting perspective on life. A few years ago, I would look to cherish the past. It would help me build my sense of origin story, showing where I had come from. Whilst this wasn’t a bad thing, I probably was also guilty of overly reaching for meaning and symbolism in the things I had done. It also meant that certain memories had a lot more power over me. I recall that when I did a Vipassanna silent meditation earlier this year, they described how living in nostalgia could become sweet, to the point where it was a negative addiction.
Now, I seemingly give far less energy to the past. What is done is done. These things may have been nice (or indeed not nice), but they don’t really have a whole lot of relation with my life right now. I don’t need to bask in past glories when there is a life to be lived right now.
Perhaps I’ve also changed so much that these past events don’t even feel like my own. I look at older pictures of myself and it feels like I am looking at a different person, living a different life. That might sound melancholic, but it’s not meant to be. I think it’s instead my way of centering myself in the present.
In the personal development world, it’s oft talked about how we seem to spend most of the time either dwelling in the past or hoping for a better future. We rarely seem to really live in the moment. Perhaps I’m more in the moment now than I was in the past.
Nonetheless, there is some symbolism to my behaviour – even if it may just be coincidental. I previously wrote about how I had fallen down the rabbit hole of Vedic Astrology. Parts of it – including that 2024 was going to be a year prone to burnout – were surprisingly accurate.
I’ve been in this tougher sub-period for 3 years. But as of 1 November, I’m now shifting to a period where things will start to get easier. It won’t happen overnight, but I’m hoping that things will get easier.
I suppose that getting rid of old papers is probably as good a way as any to mark the end of the last period, and moving into the new.
And if nothing else, my space certainly looks tidier and more inviting.