Perhaps one of the hardest rites of passage is cleaning out your parents’ house. Particularly if they were the sentimental type, like my parents.
My parents would hold onto not just one, but multiple copies of programs and souvenirs from events—graduations, weddings, funerals. Sifting through papers, greeting cards, clothes and jewelry, I’ve relived the portions of their lives that overlapped with mine. Touching their things—the delicate crinkled paper of their notes to one another as romance began, or their earliest photos—I imagine the whole of their existence, as though I might feel their hands or hear the sound of their voices again.
Tucked away in a cedar closet in my parents’ house, I found the green wool coat with a hood and belt that my parents bought at Harrod’s while living in London and that my brothers and I each wore when we were about two years old. I immediately wanted to keep it, this coat that I’d only seen in pictures before.
And then I had to ask myself: what I would do with it and all of the other things I think I want to save? Where would I store it? When would I use it and for what purpose? If I entertain thoughts of making a quilt with snippets of cloth from linens and clothes saved, would I ever be able to make the first cut with scissors? Or would I freeze in remembrance of times past?
My son has asked me not to leave him a house full of things. He’s emphasized over and over he doesn’t want a lot of stuff. We hear that all the time these days: no one wants to inherit the work and duty of shepharding antiques into the future. Silver, china, furniture … everything goes to auction houses while heirs walk away unencumbered.
I look for a compromise: maybe I’ll hold onto the recipe cards in my mother’s handwriting, scan them into a book and make the same meals for my future grandchildren. And maybe I'll donate the green coat to charity, so that another child can be warm on a cold winter day. Realistic? Probably not. Does it matter?
In the practice of yoga and meditation, we scan our bodies: where are the muscles clenching, holding so tight that they hold us back? Are our eyebrows furled? Are our shoulders hiking up toward our ears? Where can we let go, relax, and allow ourselves to go further, deeper into a pose?
What else can we release? Ideas, identities, concepts of ourselves and others that no longer serve us?
It is a practice and an art, this concept of letting go. Once we realize that many of the things we hold onto are actually restraints, sometimes, we can let go. In doing so, we gain a little freedom and space to move forward with ease.
