The Great Declutter

Wandering Through The Squabbling Brain

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Some of you have been asking where I disappeared to. It’s kind of you to notice, despite your own busy lives, that I haven’t posted here for a while. But I have a very good excuse. I’ve been wrapped up with forgetting and remembering.

I’m sure I put them somewhere. Those Air Tags I bought. The little tracking devices made by Apple that attach to things like keys, wallets, and suitcases, to help you find them when they’re lost.

The Air Tags are lost. Yes, I vividly remember putting them down somewhere and thinking what a safe place it was. It was definitely somewhere. I just can’t remember where.

I used to think I was an organized person. This is a serious blow to my self-image. What could be more pathetic than losing tracking devices, gadgets you bought precisely so you wouldn’t lose things?

Has anyone seen my AirTags?

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The problem is that these gizmos don’t work unless owned by humans with functioning brains. But my brain is tired. It takes embarrassing breaks.

Should I be sympathetic to its needs? Or should I be properly stern with it?

My tired brain is waffling now, unsure whether to forgive itself, or to be rightfully annoyed and self-critical. Trying to choose whether to go along with its stern, self-reprimanding side, or relax with its persona of kindness, acceptance. But hold on, wait a minute. Am I not one self, shaped by the processes of a single brain, wherein lies the “me”? How can I—my brain—judge what is happening to itself? How on earth can a brain have the gall, the chutzpa, to presume it can evaluate itself?

And when whatever is left of my brain has finished judging itself, how could I trust that tired old organ to be objective?

This is getting perilously close to philosophy, or perhaps neuropsychology and brain chemistry. Before heavy-duty thinking gives me a headache, I think I’ll do some stretches and get some exercise. I’ll take a little walk through my brain and choose between its competing voices.

I tie up my shoelaces and set off to stroll among the neurons.

First stop: my standards, conscience. What Freud called the “super-ego”. The one in my head is named Augustus and he’s always so terribly judgmental. I find him standing firmly, arms folded, cross. A scowl creases his weathered face.

“Peter, you idiot!” he yells, exasperated. I wince.

“How the hell could you misplace your Air Tags? Of all things?”

I shrug, hang my head. Guiltily I turn around and take my leave.

Head still hanging, I shuffle over to the next stop. It’s the home of Gimmee. He’s my instinctual desires, the primal impulses that Freud called the “id”. Good old Gimmee is my pleasure centre. He’s always seeking immediate gratification.

“Go tell your stupid conscience to get lost,” Gimmee groans. “He thinks he’s so great with those idiotic, dumb, high falutin’ standards. Can’t he leave me alone, for once? I’m enjoying the pleasures of sloth.”

I double back through the brain, bypassing the warring parties, looking for my mediating self; Freud called him the “ego”. The one I have is called Simon, from the Hebrew Shim’on, “to hear” or “to listen.” Simon is tasked with balancing the stern, lofty standards of Augustus, and Gimmee’s pleasure-seeking, with reality. I finally find Simon sitting in a comfortable leather easy chair. When I arrive he’s stroking his chin thoughtfully.

“Stop squabbling, you kids,” says the ego. His voice oozes calm and reason. “Augustus and Gimmee, c’mon, why can’t you behave yourselves?” He sighs, ever the rational mediator.

“Listen, both of you, be sensible. You are so annoying when you squabble It’s time to move on.”

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The Great Declutter

Abruptly, I did move on. It was thanks to The Great Declutter, and the Return of Long-Forgotten Memories.

Two months ago my wife Renée and I sold our house in order to move to a smaller apartment. We’d lived there almost 33 years. As a first stage, it needed to be seriously decluttered before prospective buyers could begin traipsing through the house. Then, once sold, a second stage: completely emptying it, down to bare floors and walls. It was all-consuming. And that, by the way, is my excuse for not writing recently.

First, the decluttering. I was forced to face what I had been guiltily putting off for years. It was a hair-raising sight I faced: piles of big boxes in our basement storage room, stacked one on top of the other, filled to the brim with memorabilia and personal papers. They were things that I had put aside over the course of decades. I swear the boxes were glaring at me.

I had always been too busy to deal with them properly. I was wrapped up in family responsibilities, especially my four growing children. I was also working long hours as a family physician in my office practice, doing house calls, delivering babies at all hours, seeing patients in hospital, serving on hospital committees, and teaching residents.

I’m not one of those admirable people who declutter decisively, people who can quickly, ruthlessly throw out their memorabilia. For me, going through those piles of boxes and memories would be a humungous job. I knew I would linger over them. It would take me forever. I became a champion procrastinator.

Avoidance was not just a relief. Each time I put it off felt more like a deliverance—a rescue from endless entanglement. “Someday I’ll get to those boxes,” I told myself. “Maybe in a couple of months.”

“Even better, maybe in a few years.”

Finally, I decided to stall until I retired. I’d have more time, then. “Those boxes aren’t going anywhere. They can wait.”

“Retirement” finally arrived, however, with quotation marks around it. It’s been a busy, fulfilling time of life. Always something happening that’s more appealing than spending weeks with boxes in a basement.

This spring, as the “House For Sale’ sign on the lawn drew near, I could procrastinate no longer. I pulled out the first of those big, glaring boxes. It was too heavy to lift. I had to slide it along the floor.

I dipped my hand into the big box. There were old programs from plays and concerts I barely remember attending. Boxes and carousels of my old 35 mm colour slides, from film cameras. VHS tapes, and home movies in long-obsolete, Super-8 format. Audio tape cassettes from times forgotten. I was digging through the archeology of my past.

In other boxes were a thousand photos, dozens of albums. There would be no room for them on shelves in a downsized apartment. They would all need to be digitized.

I shredded thick files of records from over three decades of teaching young doctors in my office and the hospital. My connections with them were close, each one lasting two years. Thinking of them, a wave of affection washed over me.

Glancing at these files also reminded me that my teaching colleagues and I were training the new graduates in more than clinical medicine. We were also working to improve their communication skills with patients, and—occasionally painfully necessary—even in their personal skills. It was startling. I'd forgotten the intensity of those years.

I also sifted through heavy binders of notes I’d taken during years of conferences and lectures, continuing medical education for practicing doctors. I loved going to these seminars and keeping up-to-date. But medical knowledge is continually evolving. I saw that the notes from the events I had zealously attended were now hopelessly obsolete. The updates were out-of-date.

There was a photo somebody had taken of me having lunch at one of the medical conventions. It was so long ago that the crudités on the table weren’t crudités. They were called carrots and celery.

In one old box I found a smiling photo of myself in my thirties. My hair looked big enough to have its own postal code.

Not everything was fun, of course. I’ve kept journals off and on all my life. Reading through old journals can feel sometimes like treasure hunting, but not always. I found a journal I’d kept at the time my first marriage was ending. It was an anguished time. What to do with such a diary: keep or throw out? The story it tells is an important part of my personal history. But it’s a history of private pain that I wouldn’t want my children to read. They have no need to be burdened with knowledge of those black days. As for me, being reminded was horrible.

I could barely stand glancing at a few pages of the diary. I shredded it, fast.

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Love letters

Have you, like me, come across old love letters? Some ancient ones surfaced from these old boxes. These relics bring back your past, clear and sudden.

In their handwritten lines are stories that have been packed away for years; stories that tell you more about your own intense, young self than about your love objects. Perhaps you feel a tug as you throw out these letters. They, too, are your history.

But the passion in them felt dim and distant. I hesitated only a moment before ditching them.

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What you can’t throw out

Then my old trumpet music and piano music surfaced. Will I ever go back to playing those instruments, I ask myself? Not likely. Yet I couldn’t put the music in the trash.

I excavated family relics: handling them uncovered long‑forgotten moments.

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Goosebumps

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I got goosebumps when I came across the drawings and writings of my children when they were young. I lingered over the records of their achievements. I felt a wave of warmth spill inside me.

There was no way I could throw out such precious treasures.

My heart quickened again as I started pulling out the touching thank-you letters from patients. I couldn’t discard these, either. Many came from people I’d seen through births and deaths, joys and sadness, life crises. They, too, are a kind of family—a vast, extended one.

I got seriously slowed down as I came up with one prize after another. Yet all these things are too much loved, too linked with powerful memories, to be tossed away.

Surely, the silly, squabbling, pleasure-loving and critical-judgmental parts of the brain could finally agree on this?

Time for another stroll among the neurons.

I find the three quarrelers sitting around a conference table.

Augustus, red-faced: “Peter, you idiot, at this rate you’ll never finish. Get real. This junk has been in boxes for years—you haven’t missed it, or even looked at it. Throw the damn trash out.”

Gimme, dreamily: “Why can’t I hang on to this stuff? So many precious things! Just holding them makes my skin tingle. I feel all gushy inside.”

Simon strokes his chin again. “OK, kids,” he says coolly, “I’ve heard more than enough from you.” He raises one eyebrow. “This Great Declutter business is settled. There’s a payoff for not procrastinating, and it’s the unearthing of memory.”

“Listen: we are not throwing out what we love.” He sighs. “And that’s final.”

Gimmee: “Wow! Simon, I love you.”

Augustus: “You’re nuts.”

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