I cleaned my room.

I cleaned my room and it felt great. In fact I want to record the fact that I am writing this sitting at my desk. That hasn’t happened since I moved into this house. This is momentous. I have a cup of Swiss Miss on the desk next to me and also a pen holder that is actually a drill bit holder I got at D.I. My life is great.

When you clean up you find old stuff. Like your parents’ copy of The Power and the Glory and about a dozen other books you pilfered eight years ago (including Kafka’s The Trial-- that stuff is nutty). And old notebooks. Last time I went through this exercise, months ago, I found a spiral-bound steno notebook from high school I used to draw in, but it still had some empty pages so I started using them for To Do lists and provisional plans and things. (Pretty much what I use paper for is To Do lists, and pretty much I write them during sacrament meeting.) Today I found it buried beneath a stack of papers again and it was all full except for one empty page. So I tore it out along with a couple other pages with things that were still relevant to me on them, and threw the notebook away. And I know I have a worrying tendency toward nostalgia; that’s why I consciously decided I didn’t need anything in there anymore so there was no reason to hold onto it.

Still, I couldn’t keep back the slightest twinge of sadness. This thing has my handwriting in it; it has pages full of things I was thinking about and planning and worried about forgetting, many of which I actually did, eventually. It is, in its way, a record: proof that I lived and thought during the time it represents. Sometimes it’s nice for me to have proof of that. And there’s something cool about having it in this very ad hoc form, apart from my transcripts and class notes and correspondence and (neglected) journal. Looking at these artifacts of former lives, riddled with angst and uncertainty, helps me to see progress in my self-- I’m normally pretty confident that I’m now slightly less angsty and uncertain. So it’s the tiniest bit hard to let go of that tangible reminder that I actually am moving forward. But I can’t keep everything. Moving forward entails cleaning up, organizing, and throwing away. I’m okay with that. And that in itself is progress, right?