Discarding the Past

Discarding the Past

This morning I spent a few hours in the office clearing away my old documents. I have tons of them: project papers, proposals, RFPs, whitepapers, notes, minutes-of-meeting--all the vestiges of the past.

When I left Singapore two years ago, I threw away a lot of my old stuff. But there were still many project files which I thought would be useful for me in the future. I shipped them all to Jakarta.

Now I realised that I had kept them because of sentimental reasons: I did not have the heart to "erase" all the hardwork that I had put in--days and nights slogging in my small HDB room, the cold nights in the office waiting for conference calls and the hurried proposals I wrote in strange hotel rooms in distant lands. Those papers were proof of those tumultuously exciting years that I had spent in the IT industry.

Today I threw them all away. It was like having a lobotomy, but I needed this cathartic experience. I wanted a fresh start.

All the hardwork that I had put in, all those years, will not disappear just because I threw away some yellowing piles of paper. My knowledge and experience is still with me. I am hopefully a better person because of everything that I had gone through.

We burden the soul by clinging to the weight of the past. I feel freer now that I have discarded their symbolic traces. I look forward to my new found freedom. It is that beautiful lightness of being all over again.