If you ever want proof that things are temporal, clean out your basement. I've held on to too much junk over the years and I'm at the point where I can't take it anymore. So, I've started to go through the mounds of memories piled in my basement and I'm tossing out anything I can bear to part with. But I've been surprised by something. Not at how much stuff I've chosen to keep, but at the boxes I've stored it all in.
I found one box yesterday that was full of books I'll never read and various other keepsakes that should have never been kept. The box used to be the home of a computer I bought many, many years ago—it had a 386 processor and ran Windows 3.1. If you aren't familiar with the Windows 3.1 operating system, it was before Windows 95, which was before Windows 98, which was before Windows ME, which was before Windows 2000, which was before Windows XP.
And I won't even list all of the processor chips that have come and gone since 386s, but by my count, six generations of computers came and went since I bought my 386 machine. But long after that computer gave up the ghost, the box still remains. It far outlasted the product it housed and now the box serves as simply a mechanism to hold other stuff. How ironic and depressing is that?
Who knows what else I'll find rummaging through all my junk? But I think a picture is becoming quite clear…I have too much stuff and most of it never lived up to its promises.
