over the past couple of days, my wife and i have been putting away and organizing our "chrismas closet" in the garage where we store all our decorations. we've also been cleaning and doing some reorganization of the garage as a whole. we have a large three-car garage, and we only have one vehicle at the moment. because of this, we have lots of space that can be used for storage. this is where we keep things that aren't needed frequently.
among our collection of items in the garage, we had a beautiful antique bed that belonged to my maternal grandmother. from her, it passed to her sister, my great-aunt bess, then to my mother, and from her to our daughter. when our daughter did some redecorating, she no longer had room for the bed, so we took the bed despite not having a place for it in our home. i couldn't bear for the bed to leave the family, so it's been taking up space in our garage since then in the hopes that another family member would claim it. that hasn't happened, so we made the difficult decision to donate the bed to a local charity as we cleaned and straightened up the garage. the bed's headboard and footboard have been blocking access to a cabinet where some gift wrap items are stored, and my wife needs to get to those things. there was no place else to put the bed pieces, and we decided it was better for someone to have it who needed the bed, rather than gathering dust in the garage.
as i've thought about the bed and what it means to me, i've come to realize that, while the bed is beautiful and perhaps valuable as an antique, i don't connect it with my grandmother. she didn't particularly like it, which is how it came to be in her sister's possession. my mother didn't use the bed until after i was grown and on my own, so i don't associate it with my time growing up. the only time i ever used the bed was on the infrequent occasions we spent the night at our daughter's home. it was hard for me to come to the realization that i was holding onto the bed because it had been in my grandmother's home at one time. it isn't the bed that connects me to my grandmother. rather, it is my wonderful memories of happy times spent with her as i grew up. the bed is simply an object, and someone ought to own it that will use and appreciate it. it will soon leave my possession and will, i hope, make someone else happy as they use it.
when i go into the garage and see how much more functional moving the bed and doing some rearranging because of the extra space created by its removal makes the space, i realize how impractical it was to hang onto a thing that was of no use to me. we will enjoy the space in the garage much more and someone i will never know will benefit from the decision to give the bed away. we humans have difficulty with change, despite knowing that change is the only constant in our lives. we don't want to change even when it's to our benefit. the bed was something that held me back and made life more difficult, yet i didn't want to let it go. now that the decision to release it has been made, i'm happy to have made it.
may we see how clinging to things that connect us to the past often gets in the way of living in the present. may we appreciate our memories without allowing them to hold us back. may we see that it is not things that are important. may we embrace change, rather than resisting the good that can come from it. shalom.
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