Crate #2 and the Mystery of the Missing Piece of the Puzzle

It seems like every time I sit down to journal to myself or to write content for publication, I wind up wandering into topics that are related to being more present in the current moment. I guess that speaks volumes about what's coming up in my own life these days. This week I'm going to continue on the same thread, but from a slightly different perspective. As usual it all comes with a story. 

We have had some exceptionally large temperature swings in Chicago over the last two weeks. In fact over the weekend we touched almost 80 degrees on the thermometer only to be followed on Tuesday morning when we woke up to snow on the ground. To take advantage of the good stretch of weather that came before the Spring snow, I decided to spend some time last Sunday cleaning the garage. I don't know about you, but in my world the garage is the last stop for many things that probably should have found their way to the garbage can or to Goodwill ages ago. Some of these items in exile spend a few months in the garage and others take up residence on a seemingly permanent basis. 

The most notable of the long term residents in my garage are a pair of plastic storage bins that have been jammed in corner buried underneath sporting goods, unused Elfa shelving supplies and various landscaping equipment. If I'm not mistaken, these two particular crates have been in my garage completely unopened for the entire nine years my wife Christiana and I have lived at our present address. The reason these plastic crates have remained in exile are absolutely clear to me. They both contain things from my past that I have been unwilling, and in many ways even unable to look at for years. 

Crate #1 was a collection of stuff from my childhood, including things like:

• Letters from old girlfriends
• Bowling and hockey trophies
• Mattel electronics handheld sports video games
• Old journals with a few pages filled out and tons of empty pages that I never got to
• Hockey cards
• 7/11 Baseball trading cups from the 1970s
• And a whole lot of other random things that I decided to hang on to through the years

Crate #2 on the other hand was not in any way random. There was only one category of things that made up the entirety of crate #2 which, by the way was jammed full to the top. Inside crate #2 were dozens of framed photos of my first wife and I over the two decades we spent together. Each framed photo was carefully wrapped in bubble wrap and white packaging paper exactly the way they were when my ex-wife gave the to me when we split up sixteen years ago. She told me she had no desire to keep anything that reminded her of me and said I could take them with me or she would get rid of them. None of these photos had seen the light of day since they went into that crate and the most attention they ever got was when they got moved from place to place in the years since my divorce. 

Something felt different to me when I came across crate #2 this time around thoug. It was almost like crate #2 was nudging me to open it up and take a peek as if some new intelligence was waiting to be unveiled if I could summon up the courage to crack open the lid and unwrap even one of the old framed photos. Since I'm a bit of an expert at kicking the ball down the field of life, I decided to instead dig into crate #1 and look through some of my childhood memorabilia that has been mothballed for at least a decade at this point. 

For about an hour, I sat on the floor of the garage rummaging through notes from teenage girlfriends and thumbing through old journals. At one point I even dug up a 9-volt battery and hooked it up to one of those very first generation sports video games only to be astonished that it still worked! All the while crate #2 kept subtly calling out to me to be examined further. Eventually I scooted over, sheepishly cracked open the lid and unwrapped a couple of photos. I wasn't ready to go through the whole crate and make a decision about whether or not to keep the photos or toss them, but I was proud of myself for taking a baby step to confronting these exiled pieces of my story from the past for the first time in many years. 

Later that same night as I sat in meditation, I asked my Angels and Ancestors to help me reveal what intelligence I might glean from my experiences of the day. Additionally I asked for some guidance as to why I have a tendency to hang onto old things like this even though they are in no way a part of the present life that I am living. What came through for me loud and clear was a two word statement, which was: 

Unfinished Business...

Do you ever go back and ruminate about the past wishing you could actually travel back in time and create different outcomes? I am at peace with the general trajectory of the story of my life, but I also acknowledge that I would have loved to have had additional closure on some of the chapters that have already been written. There are SO many things that did not turn out the way I saw them turning out and while I accept all of that is with Divine intention, my human is attached to the energetic weight (and in some cases even the shame) of the unfinished business I left behind.

In many ways hanging onto things from the past was creating the illusion that I could still go back and attend to that unfinished business that has been causing me to do some level of self-shaming for years. Maybe someday I would go back and fill in the blank pages of those old journals with the stories that never got written when I was a child? Perhaps someday my first wife might reach out and ask for a photo or two from the past and I would still have them? It was if keeping pieces of my past exiled in plastic crates in my garage was similar to hanging on to that old pair of jeans that you haven't been able to fit into for decades. What it was creating for me was the hope of a different outcome: a revision of the story if you will. 

A new thought occurred to me after reflecting on this whole experience for the last few days though. Maybe it is perfectly okay that there is unfinished business in my past. Perhaps it was time for me to not only accept the fact that countless pieces of my past were going have loose ends, but to actually embrace the concept that our entire life is filled with unfinished business. By embracing the truth that it is not my responsibility to leave every story of my life perfectly complete, I give myself permission to let go of the heavy energetic weight of the past and be more fully invested in the present moment.

Just the other morning Emma and I were putting together one of her newest puzzles. As we got closer to finishing, I started to notice that I couldn't find any piece that looked like to bottom left corner. There was a brief moment of panic when we had the entire puzzle put together minus one piece and that piece was nowhere to be found. As it turns out the bottom corner piece was underneath Emma's butt and we laughed and laughed as we completed our masterpiece. While it was a fortuitous ending that likely prevented some tears, I have to remind myself that our time spent putting together our puzzle was still divine, even if we had never found that missing piece. 

What unfinished business are you ready to let go of in your life? The simple act of letting go of the need to finish everything perfectly can help you be more present and give the time and energy to take on something new that will serve your highest purpose! That's all for this time. Sending you love and blessings for an amazing week. 

Jim