Claire writes: ‘In the 1980’s as a teacher in a rural secondary school in Kenya, I kept a diary every day for 2.5 years. For the last 40 years, these multiple volumes have moved with me from house to house. I have never opened them. Slowly sorting through boxes from my parents, I have discovered that Mum kept every single (numbered) letter that I wrote. That’s two versions of all those memories.
In this extensive sorting out of rather organised family stuff, I have committed that my children won’t have so much sorting when we die. Mum and Dad weren’t too bad – but I have inherited the RSVP’s to my Granny’s wedding in 1928. All of them. And a whole lot more!
The chuck or keep question for my Kenya memories has come up for me every few years. And I never know what to do. Until this weekend. Faced with another pile of the same memories, I had to choose. Read them? Keep them? Turn them into a book? (the moment for that has gone, I think). It’s interesting that only when the duplicate memories turned up that I knew that the right thing, for me, was to chuck the lot without reading any of it. That experience formed much of who I am today. But that was then and this is now.
One of the learnings is that there are some decisions where it’s OK not to have an answer. Revisiting from time to time is useful. And then something will happen and we will Know know”
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