Busy Tuesday

Today is Tuesday, almost six o'clock in the afternoon. I really had a busy day. This morning I went to the gym for a little workout. Well, morning is really my morning. I got there at 10 and left around 11:45. It was a "grueling" workout but I liked it. Actually, I went yesterday, too. But that was not what made the day busy for me.

Now comes the $64,000 question. When do things get old and when are they supposed to get thrown out? I really mean paper things. Bills, statements, mementos, letters, cards etc.

The way I did it at the beginning of each year I threw out previous year's statements except bank documents. But this didn't do much to my existing quantities of other papers.

Now I decided to review my situation. I am going through systematically each drawer and it is amazing the wealth of history I am finding. I have a shredder that I bought a few years ago and right now it already earned its cost (actually it was pretty cheap).

Yesterday and today I filled bag after bag with the results of the shredding. And, I have a lot more to do.

But the question is at what point one decides what to get rid of and what to keep. This is not a business so I don't have to worry about record keeping. The stuff that I am sorry to throw out is primarily sentimental. They have no value to anybody else but me. I am looking at them and remembering. I don't know if that is good or not but it certainly feels good.

I have nobody to share these with but even if I had children they couldn't care less, they wouldn't appreciate it. Actually, my wife didn't care much about the old things. I was more sentimental than She was. She always told me to throw all that junk out.

It is a funny thing. The way I see it the older we get the more we try to appreciate the older things. Maybe because we are the only one appreciating the old. Nobody else is!