I have started a new project. We are doing some renovation of our laundry room. A consequence of that decision is that I am going to have to revise the storage closet off my office. That, in turn, will require disposing of some files and papers. Some of the accumulation is “important” … receipts, tax returns, manuals, etc. but mostly they are class notes, sermons, lesson plans from thirty plus years of study and teaching at work and church.
In the past, when presented opportunity to toss this stuff, I have deferred. After all, some day, someone will carefully sort through it all and discover the hidden “gems” scattered throughout. The problem is that my storage closet is like the abandoned gold mines of the west. There may be gold in there but the cost of extracting it is too high.
I am reading the novel “Gilead” currently. The central character is an aged pastor writing to his son as his death nears. As muses over his sermon material from fifty years of preaching, he has this to say:
It’s humiliating to have written as much as Augustine, and then to have to find a way to dispose of it. There is not a word in any of those sermons I didn’t mean when I wrote it. If I had the time, I could read my way through fifty years of my innermost life. What a terrible thought. If I don’t burn them someone else will sometime, and that’s another humiliation.
I cannot avoid the humilation of having to dispose of what I have imagined was of importance but I can avoid the humilation of someone else disposing of it.