A story about old MacBooks
Spring cleaning and other matters / Issue 1,387
Oh, hi friends!
There’s nothing quite as liberating as clearing those things that no longer serve us. It opens up emotional and physical space so we can focus on what’s most important.
My professional organizer friend Linda Samuels messaged me this on Instagram after I posted about recycling some electronics.
Do you agree with her?
I do.
The hardest part about moving is there’s too much to do. There are so many big things— canceling utilities, hiring movers, PACKING! — that the little things get overlooked.
Still, each time I’ve moved, I’ve spent night after night going through boxes, recycling old papers, giving away books on my Brooklyn stoop, selling anything worth anything on Facebook. It always feels cleansing. Deeply stressful and time-consuming, yes, but ultimately: cleansing.
I’ve lived in one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight apartments in New York over 15 years. (One of those was only for a week, but still, if you go through the burden of moving in and out, it counts.)
During this time, I started accidentally collecting electronics. Makes sense. My hands have been on a keyboard at least some part of the day, every day, for most of the last 15 years. (Scary.)
The white MacBook I had in college and came with me to New York.
The black MacBook I received as a parting gift of shame from my employer after they laid me off seven weeks after starting my editorial assistant job. (The amount of money I made during that time was less than the cost of a MacBook, so, no complaints.)
The silver MacBook was the replacement for the black MacBook after it decided it no longer wanted to live.
I carried these computers and their umbilical cord chargers from apartment to apartment, job to job, chapter to chapter.
Each time I moved I looked at the laptop pile and thought, “I should figure those things out.”
Which meant, figure out how to get them to work, go through their contents, move their contents to my new computer, factory reset and then recycle them.
That always was a little too much to do in the chaos of moving.
So I packed them up and brought them with me, again and again.
There is a cost to the items we carry, the ones that take up space in our homes and our psyches.
The clothes that itch, the skin care products that congeal, the beans that expire in the back of your cupboard.
Why are you letting them stay in your life?
Why can’t you let them go?
I relistened to The Courage to Be Rich by Suze Orman last week — so good, you gotta read or listen, especially the first few chapters — and she talked about going through your home and identifying items to toss, recycle, or give away.
Find 25 items to get rid of, she told me as I ran loops in the park on a frigid morning. Find 25 items to give away. Embrace abundance and clarity.
OK, Suze!
Winter makes you stay home and nest, and nesting can make you look at your belongings in a new light.
On Friday, I began scouting around for what I no longer need.
There. The laptop pile. A task with multiple tentacles.
We are not moving.
There is no deadline to shove everything we own in boxes.
Which, annoyingly, made Friday the perfect time for this multiple-tentacled task.
The white MacBook has English papers from UCLA and my film school application and photos once uploaded to Facebook and random emo poems and my old iTunes playlists and resumes and plans and dreams. I found a folder marked New York with dozens of applications from when I first moved to the city, including a cover letter for a publishing internship at Harry N. Abrams, Inc., which I applied to because I wanted to “work with words.”
I never heard back from them.
Eventually I got a different job, different internship.
Twelve years later, Abrams Books — that’s their new name — published my three journals.
Life is strange.
The black MacBook wouldn’t turn on, not after I swapped out the battery, not after I tried to reset the NVRAM or start in disk utility mode, not after I hooked it to an external monitor. I could hear it, but it wouldn’t let me see what was on the screen. Maybe for the best.
The silver MacBook emitted a high-pitched BEEP BEEP BEEP when plugged in, then paused, then BEEP BEEP BEEP again over a blank screen.
Oh yes. I remember when this one broke.
One charger was dead.
Another’s cable was frayed, a fire hazard in waiting.
We live with our electronic toys, and we love them.
Maybe too much.
A part of me always believed I needed to rescue every shred of thought and every crumb of writing from these old devices. That I needed to capture and stick them onto a USB thumb drive and then probably lose that USB thumb drive in another move.
But staring at these busted and beloved pieces of polycarbonate and aluminum and metal, I considered the real cost.
We need to have faith our items have served their purpose.
We need to move on.
Maybe this sounds dramatic, maybe you don’t attach larger significance to any material items in your life.
But it is rare to get these reminders of who we once were and who we still are — the 19-year-old drafting flowery essays, the 21-year-old submitting resumes into the void — and hard to simply decide to let them go.
And yet, I think, we must.
I took the bus to the Apple store 45 minutes before they closed. I told the woman greeting people at the door that I had some stuff to recycle.
Great! I can handle that for you.
I retrieved from my backpack the white MacBook, the black MacBook, the silver MacBook, the three chargers, plus three ancient iPhones because I never forget the cherry on top of the sundae.
Here you go.
Great! You’re all set.
That’s it?
Yup!
I walked into the cold night and kept walking, faster and faster up the street, counting the blocks, my backpack 10 pounds lighter, 15 years sloughed off my shoulders, my body so light I could fly.
What on earth would I write next?
Momentous! I love the full backstory of where your 'devices' came from, and the purpose they served. But more than that, congratulations on their big sendoff! You assessed, reviewed, wiped, and then let go. And you did it even when not prompted by a move. Way to go, Kara!
Recently, I gave a workshop about change. I shared this passage from my personal journal and I thought you'd appreciate because of your letting go experience.
Journal passage....
What I understand is that letting go doesn’t mean we have to forget. It just means that we release ourselves from holding on. We release ourselves from an obligation or responsibility or expectation. We make a bit more space in our hearts and minds for new energy to flow. We lift the anchor. We sail on.
Happy sailing, my friend!
Oh, the things we pack and move are because we can’t let go. Confession: My first Mac computer (I bought after college graduation) is in its original box in the basement. It was my constant companion when I freelanced — a younger me It’s not weighing me down yet. 😉