Accumulation.
It’s amazing the amount of assorted detritus you accumulate over the years. When I first moved out to the US in 2005, I pretty much threw almost everything I owned into a bunch of cardboard boxes, shipped them over here, then promptly forgot all about most of it.
So, today I decided to break open some of those boxes and sort through some of the stuff I’d gathered over the years. Wow. Just, wow. I found my 18th birthday card from my mother, as well as almost every birthday card from her since. I found two old filofaxes, one of which chronicles my old demoscene days, complete with a long list of “contacts”, and the other documents much of my college days, complete with London travelcards circa 1991. There was loads more too - a huge stack of old photos, various old cassettes (including a much-liked mix tape someone made for me quite a few years back), a heap of stuff relating to my old bands (including a one-off 10” single we did), hundreds of old gig tickets, and loads more.
It’s hard not to take a saunter down memory lane when you unearth this sort of stuff. So I did. And what I came up with was quite surprising.
The amount of people who have come and gone through my life is quite staggering. People who you were once inseparable friends with, and now you can’t even remember their surnames. People you have annoyed and alienated without really knowing why or how. The things you have done that, although fairly significant at the time, have faded into irrelevance.
I miss my old bands. I miss some of my old friends and some of the old places that I used to go to. But things move on for a reason, and, despite some good memories, there are things I have no interest in revisiting, other than keeping the occasional keepsake.
My “old” life was good. But so’s my new one. And I intend to make it keep getting better.
