Over lunch yesterday my wife and I were laughing at the extreme wide variety of miscellaneous things that are in a particular junk drawer next to my sink.
She was searching for something she had misplaced, and was overcome with laughter by the oddities she encountered while rummaging through this particular catch all. (I have more than one in the house)
She pondered out loud, “if 1,000 yrs from now people were ‘only known by their junk drawer,’ than the analysis results for you Craig-from that drawer anyway-would come back inconclusive because it’s the craziest batch of stuff mixed together I’ve ever seen!
We laughed until we almost cried as she listed some of the things she saw in her adventure looking in there.
“Whatever opinion or assumptions they would come up with about you would be so far off the mark from who you really are,” she said as she gathered her thoughts.
We laughed again spontaneously and agreed that the results would probably be off for most other people as well because junk drawers are not “personal collections”that define people as much as places we put things we haven’t dealt with yet.
While still smiling and giving me her Mom’s cute little wink, she offered “You really should write about junk drawers tomorrow!”
“I like the hook, so what’s the bottom line people should consider?” I asked her, leaning forward.
She thoughtfully cradled her glass of sweet tea in her hands, looked away for a moment, and then suddenly said very matter of factly:
“I think we can all be guilty at times of letting ‘old junk from our lives’ we haven’t dealt with define us and even limit us, when it really shouldn’t.
When we do that, we hold ourselves back from just being who we actually already are…”
“We are more than our junk drawers!” she declared triumphantly, raising her glass for a toast.
We giggled at that together before letting a few moments of profound silence let that sink in.
Then she added, “Others don’t know what’s in our ‘junk drawers,’ so that doesn’t have any effect on the way our true friends see us…
They may accurately see and voice their appreciation to us of ‘who we are;’ and at the very same time, we can be flattered by what they said and yet dismiss their evaluation as just ‘encouraging friends doing what they do…’
We can’t really receive what they say sometimes because we so quickly dismiss it within ourselves by thinking things like, ‘that is nice of them to say, but they just think that because they don’t really know me…
It’s like people come to your house and say how nice it is, and you can’t agree because all you can think about is a junk drawer they can’t even see!”
I readily agreed, “If it’s hard for us to embrace, and just ‘simply be’ as amazing as our true friends already think of us…
Then you’re exactly right, maybe it’s because we do have junk in our lives that is holding us back that shouldn’t!…
It should be cleaned out and dumped at the curb, instead of letting it define us any longer–because after all, we really are more than our junk drawers!”
I leaned back into my chair, pondering all we discussed, and realized I have an amazing wife… And that I have some work to do…
If I am to be completely set free from all the figurative (and literal!) junk drawers holding me back!
