To Keep or not to Keep?
By Jonathan Lam on 01/28/16
Tagged: the-homework-life the-homework-life-thought
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We as humans are possessive creatures. We like to hold on to things, and it's very difficult to let anything go to waste if it has any value left to us, whether it be monetary or sentimental.
I came across this recently when I was cleaning out my room again. The last time I had cleaned out the shelves, I had merely rearranged it into a slightly more presentable form. My bed (a bunk bed) and the desk had been arranged to give me more free space. The second bed still lay there, unused, as well as a pile of undecided items on the bottom level of my shelf.
The dilemma hit me harder this time, myself a year older than the previous instance. What should I do with them? This pile included a pile of memories and trophies to my schoolwork dating back to seventh grade. This time, I made the decision to clean it out better than last time. I moved away all the photos to their respectable spots in communal photo albums and the yearbooks in bookshelves and the trophies in trophy cabinets. My oldest art piece, a dusty clay humanoid-creature that had two broken extremities from seven years ago, went in the trash; the others went to the display cabinets downstairs. This left behind only the paper remnants of my scholastic history. I left the flat artwork in my room, as well as the seventy pounds of schoolwork that I had accumulated over these past three years.
It may be simple to say that I am a nerd, and that I prize my academic achievement, but I don't think it's as simple as that. Although I keep it as a "reference" in case I want to look back on my old schoolwork, the number of times I've looked back to schoolwork from past years has been kept to a minimum (maybe three times?). Or it might be that I'm just narcissistic, happy looking at the result of my struggles at school. It is the fruit of my mental labor, after all.
Why don't I prize the photos of myself, or the trophies I've achieved? It's likely that it's solely because of my strange devotion to more concrete mediums, such as text and mathematics, rather than the subtleties and depth you can find in images; more importantly, however, is that I find images and trophies too ubiquitous and boring. We get trophies for simply participating in AYSO soccer — heck, I was near worst on that team (and even worse on Travel soccer) in my final years! And the photos? With my overly-obsessive Dad with his expensive cameras, I have nowhere to hide. And there undoubtedly exist many hundreds of photos of me — thousands, perhaps — somewhere either in cyberspace or on photographic paper.
In contrast to the forced photos and the unnecessary prizes, school is something I've worked hard towards and therefore I hoard my work (the art pieces less so, but they don't take up much space and I've yet to decide what to do with them). Hours upon hours upon hours have gone into those heaps of papers in my room; and, despite all the jokes I've made, it's unlikely I'll ever burn them or destroy them because of the efforts I've taken to make them, the same effort that has floated my grades up to the top. And then there's been the effort to store them so meticulously by subject and grade in full cardboard boxes — that extra work probably adds even more value to the schoolwork.
The interesting thing is that this doesn't apply only to papers or physical objects: it applies to anything you can't let go of. I've been forced into almost eleven years of piano lessons and practice, as well as a few years of Chinese lessons. Right now, I'm playing "Very Difficult II" music that masters play (albeit much less masterfully than they) and I am approaching a level of conversational Chinese. I always say I want to quit the both of them; however, I don't know if I can. I won't be able to live with myself if I don't give my absolute best (in contrast to Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye, who is absolutely killing me with his ignorance and self-unawareness). This is the same force that is keeping me on top of school and sports: both my academics and running are extremely painful to maintain, but I don't have the heart to let myself down. I simply can't.
The best way I can describe this is a self-inertia, a sort of resistance to changes in real life. Kind of similar to social inertia (but for the individual), you cannot change too quickly, in order to keep stability with what works best for you. We don't want to throw away our time, our sweat and blood. Ultimately, to those who try very hard, this means it is very difficult to let go of anything. Fortunately for me, this "inertia" is keeping me up in these arduous times, in this difficult "homework life."
I don't know if this hoarding obsession is going to be an infinite vicious (or is it virtuous) cycle that will eat me up, or if it is just a phase. Maybe my opinions on this will change dramatically in the next few years, and this post will be obsolete. But until my thoughts change, I have the full intention to go ahead with this collection of now-useless papers, just to remind me of all the work I've done; I don't know if I'll ever have the mind to ruin this hard work. I'll just have to wait and see …