Wednesday

Letting Go Of The Stuff - Part 1

This post is especially meaningful considering that the pastor of the church I attend spoke on this this past weekend.

Now that I am thoroughly settled into my home, thoroughly ingraining myself in my community and doing my best to do my best on my new social media gig at one of the largest companies in the world (no pressure), I have begun to sift and sort through my stuff...

Garbage out...

Once I hit adulthood I began to collect a record of my happenings --- ticket stubs from great concerts, pictures with the handful of famous people I'd bump into on the streets of New York, my documented experiences and paraphernalia from my fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, Playbills from famous Broadway plays. My thought behind doing this is that should I suddenly cease to exist on this planet, as is often the case with humans, particularly African American males, those I leave behind would be able to sort through my stuff and piece together the life I've lived --- who I was and where I've been. There are journals that spell out in great detail my goals, aspirations and dreams. In the midst of my stuff anyone looking will find my heart.

How do I know this? Because a year and a half ago I dug up all my stuff when I uprooted my life and all my unrealized, boxed-up dreams and transported them from New York, New York to Atlanta, Georgia. As I sifted through what I was or was not going to take I smiled, got happy and got angry and almost cried with all the Erics that I've been over the years. I think I'm Eric 7.0 right now. Some of the stuff is junk, maybe even more than half, but that forty-five percent or less of me that is in boxes or giant Tupperware and file folders has been, for a very long time, the only thing that proves I am who I say that I am. It is proof that my heart is in fact what I wake up in the morning believing it to be. Not the man who doesn't walk the dog at the exact minute that I say I will, who sometimes sleeps through his alarm and often rushes out of the house in the morning dragging my child behind me as I'm dropping things behind me along the way. The man who falls asleep on the couch at eight in the evening fully dressed because I've been up since five in the morning trying not to run late in the morning. The stuff of my life is proof that I am not merely the sum of what I don't do as a husband or the silly occasional to frequent mistakes I make as a grown man.

This holding on to my experiences also reaches back and draws strength from my childhood desire for greatness. To this day I believe as I did when I was a child that I will be great one day. Because of this I want a record of where I've been and what I've done.

My stuff is proof that I am greater than my mistakes no matter how harshly I might be judged by others.

But it is time for the stuff to go, or at least most of it.

Stay tuned for what this means. By my next post on this I'll know what it means too.

Thanks for reading! To learn more about me, you can read my story.