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Holding On And Letting Go Edition #51 — 8 Dec 2003 Holding On In A Throw-Away Society Hi there folks. It's time once again to make that all important decision: to read this newsletter, discard it or, politely drag and drop it into your "I'll eventually get around to it" email folder. It's hard to say sometimes whether something is of value to us or not, especially when other more pressing concerns are vying for our attention. I hope this month's Get Real Newsletter will fall into a useful category for your life. My Good Old Morley Pedal I'm still enchanted by a recent event — nothing profound compared to a good celebrity sex scandal but meaningful nonetheless in a personal/life-lesson sort of way. It has to do with a purchase I made more than twenty years ago. That's when I walked into a music store and bought an A/B foot switch by Morley (famous for their wah wah pedals!) The pedal would allow me to plug two guitars into the same amplifier input. That's what made me want to buy it. The pedal cost around $60.00 — considerable for a poor musician back in those days. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make use of it the way I'd intended so I did what anyone who owns something useless but too expensive to throw away does: I put it in a cardboard box and hid it in the dark recesses of my closet; a space reserved for other invaluable "do not throw aways" like two broken "curly cord" guitar cables that I never intended to repair, even if I could, and shoeboxes filled with other stuff I don't want to look at, and maybe never again... Yet time has a funny way of making things useful once we grow into them. For instance, I once bought a huge volume of Charles Dickens's best stories but didn't have the nerve to open it for almost eight years. But once I did though, I devoured it in short order. And so too it was, that upon joining the Rick Justice Band for their 2001 US tour, that I found myself anxiously digging up that long-forgotten relic and symbol of my careless spending habit. And for the next year and a half, that old Morley A/B pedal shared the stage with me every night. Therein lies the charm: after some twenty years of neglect, what I had written off as useless had now become a vital asset in my stage survival gear. Oh sure, I could have gone out and bought myself a new foot pedal at the music store, but this was more meaningful. It was a moment of salvation in the life of an admitted hoarder; I'd finally found a use for at least one thing that I've been holding onto. In the last year, this pattern has replayed itself several times so that I now actually have many formerly-deemed "useless" items in daily use. Ah — redemption! Hoarding I recently looked into my father's basement workshop and saw that he had amassed 4 old electric kettles; all of them broken and beyond repair - even if he had the desire to repair them. Fact is, they'll never boil water again in our lifetimes! Under the circumstances, and knowing the man as well as I do, I DEFINITELY think this would technically qualify as "hoarding". It's a common habit, this hoarding thing. For many of us it has to do with our not being able to let go of something because it may once have cost us a good deal of money. And now, even though it's broken or useless, and just taking up valuable space in our homes — we don't have the courage to throw it out. Often it's because we just can't seem to part with the memory of it's former purchase price, when it was still working. So we lie to ourselves that hopefully "someday" we'll have the time, patience or technology to bring old dead things back to life again. Which reminds me, I wonder if Walt Disney — rumoured to be in cryogenic suspension — has freezer burn yet? I wouldn't want to eat him, that's for sure! Being brand new, I had a more valid excuse for putting my Morley guitar pedal on ice in the unlikely event that it should ever become useful. I do, however, also possess that dreaded hoarding instinct with other things in my life. Being an apologist for all of us who fall into this category: I suspect it's an ancient, fear-based "gathering and storing impulse" that dates back to a time in our human history when kettles weren't so readily available. Like squirrels gathering nuts for the winter, we may also try to hedge against future uncertainties by hoarding assets. Then again, maybe it's just because we can't get over how much we had to pay for the damned thing! Never Discard An Old Shoe Box One way to avoid having to throw out a perfectly good shoe box is to fill it with something. This past week I found an old shoe box full of stationary products which I'd been hoarding since my days of working at one of Canada's major banking institutions — during which I may have also spent some time in the [cough, cough] STATIONARY DEPARTMENT! [a wave of indecipherable murmering erupts] This shoe box — in part symbolic of a time when my workplace ethics were, shall we say "less than honorable" — was stuffed to the brim with things such as dried up old pens now useful only for engraving; half-dead felt-tip markers in colors I'm still too embarrassed to use; disfigured paper clips far beyond rehabilitation; brittle rubber bands that had long ago lost their "sproing" factor; broken columns of staples in sizes perfectly suited for jamming any currently functioning stapler; two hard, dry and dirty erasers with the number "666" stamped onto them as though they held the seal of approval from the prince of darkness himself; some broken, tooth-marked pencils (in yellow, of course) with the eraser worn down to the metal holder so you could also shred your paper as you were correcting; a little plastic ruler (metric!) that I must have borrowed from some kid who's probably still looking for me, and finally, at the very bottom of the box, lint balls and the usual collection of sedimentary crud expected to be found at the bottom of any storage vessel worth its weight in long, faithful neglect. All of the overtly useless stuff went into the garbage. The rest I kept, neatly repacking it for when that day comes, twenty years from now, when I will reopen that shoe box to see what other resources I've been hoarding for no other apparent motive than "Because". Some of my resources have seen their "best before" dates come and go without my ever having made use of them. Perhaps some of those felt-tip markers would have been better served in the hands of a table full of scribbling kids in a Kindergarten classroom somewhere instead of dying a dry useless death in an old shoe box somewhere in a dark closet... ...oh, which reminds: Is there anything that you have that maybe you need to get rid of? Do you have any useful resources that you're not sharing with others because hoarding feels better to you right now, emotionally, than letting go? To hold onto or to give — that is the question. Don't be too hasty, of course. After all, I did wind up using one of those mangy, jaundiced pencils and that little metric ruler for some design work on my new website after I had rediscovered them. The thing is though, that I already had a much better ruler and a much better pencil that I could have used instead. They were sitting in another shoe box of stationary in my desk drawer. The moral of the story? Not everything is a MORLEY!
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