When you leave home for two years, you pack up everything that you aren't taking with you and store it away to await your return. There it sits - in a shelf, on a desk, in totes or boxes - in limbo, along with most of your relationships with family or friends (you may write or talk to them on rare occasion, but contact is of a limited nature). When you come home you review your past and sift through that which you have literaly "put on a shelf".
This has been the pursuit I have been engaged in over the last few days since I returned home. After organizing the furniture in my room, I went through my totes and boxes that I had left behind. Many of the clothes will be donated, some of the books no longer interest me, and much of the general clutter and odds and ends simply will get thrown away. I find it amazing that after looking at something which had meant a lot to you before, you can feel no emotional attachment, and wonder why it was important in the first place!
I have learned through this that things are truly of little value or significance in the grand scheme. If I can (after two years) look at an erstwhile prized possession, and have no other feelings towards it than to wonder where the most convenient waste basket is, then there will likely be no physically item or article which we would yearn to lay claim to in the hereafter.
What does matter? Family; a given, I know, but nevertheless true. I called most of my immediate relatives this afternoon, and visited some of the others the day I got home. Even of my friends, I am sure that there will be some who, like clothes, no longer fit. This is a harsh truth it may seem, but as Robert Frost said: "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood". Our paths parted when I left, and while the paths of some (I sincerely hope) will reconnect with mine, some will certainly not.
But when all is said and done, do I intend to reclaim from death my past life? No, not in full. Look back in fondness upon the embers of fires of the past, and let their warmth carry you onward, but do not claim the ashes. Such is my intent.
But there are things I will never leave to the halls of the past! Those are not things, but family. Let all the articles I have or will gather over my lifetime stay and rot upon the earth, but let me live such a life that I can claim my family in the eternities! That is all that truly matters anyway.
In summary, my current endeavors are to not be "caught up in the thick of thin things".
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