Being able to get up and take a shower when you’re sick is one of those things that feels amazing and a luxury, honestly. When you're feeling unwell and able to keep some semblance of a normal day. I even put on deodorant, even though I haven't gone outside, yet. I’m feeling better today than yesterday and the day before that, so that’s a win. Again, this is feeling like a bad cold, as opposed to the more extreme symptoms of Covid. I’m really grateful for vaccines and the ability to access them. Otherwise, I’m sure this would have been worse. Hanging out with Cooper, Sage and Banjo all day has been pretty cool.
I didn’t want to just lay around in bed all day today, so I made myself scrambled eggs before Julia had to get to work. I have to be quick in order to have something decent early in the day since she works from home. Anyway, I had breakfast and made it a point to go to the basement and start going through my boxes to see what I wanted to bring upstairs. Honestly, there’s a lot of stuff down there that I probably won’t look at much. I have a ton of old photographs that I need to put into photo albums. There’s a lot of personal papers, cards, old exhibition cards and information and a lot of random things that I’ve saved. Just like looking at things once I got them to the new studio where I’m feeling less connected to older work, I also find myself feeling less nostalgic about a lot of the stuff I brought here. The things that I feel like I value most are my old sketchbooks and journals. Everything else is just kind of *there*; I don’t feel as connected to some of the other things.
Before I moved, I thought that there was so much more that I *needed* to have around me, but that's not true any more. The older I get, there's a difference in how I view certain belongings. Perhaps it's not so much the belongings themselves, but how I incorporate them into my surroundings, or not. I think that's where I am right now. There's definitely a class of my personal things that no longer serve me. They belonged to a certain time in my life, good, bad or otherwise, but enough time has passed that I no longer need to keep them around. Practicing gratefulness and detachment are wonderful things to incorporate into daily life. These days, more often I'm thinking about what's going to be left behind when I'm gone and who will care. I won't know nor care what happens because...death. However, since I'm still alive, I still experience sentimentality and even nostalgia, to a certain degree and those things always color how I feel about whatever I'm considering for keeping or letting go.
Keeping some markers of one's earlier life is important to me. It's a part of remembering, much like keeping a journal and rereading it can connect us to a part of our life that we may have forgotten about. For example, before my studio move, I rediscovered a number of letters from a friend that I worked with years ago when she traveled to and lived in London and later the Pacific Northwest. I'd completely forgotten about that time and how I used to actually write to people when they moved away. I don't know if I really need to keep them, but so far, I am.
TM
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