The Art of Letting Go

“Have I used this object in the last six months?” “Will I need this object in the next six months?” – I repeated the questions to myself as I rummaged through the contents of my drawer. It was one of my many attempts to bring order to years of accumulated clutter. A dried-out marker? Absolutely not. The wrapper of a long-expired chocolate? No thank you. A crumbled sheet of absent-minded doodles? Not even a question. I had read about this triaging system online, a feature of minimalist decluttering. The rule seemed incredibly efficient…until I reached the bottom of the drawer. Old letters, tickets, stickers and cards lay there, untouched for years. By the same logic, their fate should have been a no-brainer. Yet I hesitated. My very logical system seemed to have met its limit: it could tell me what I no longer needed, but not what I was ready to let go of.

Utility, as it happens, can be a rather poor measure of what we value. A simple train ticket can carry the memories of those who once sat beside us. A photograph becomes more than an image – it becomes proof of a different time in our lives. We turn ordinary objects into evidence of the past, which is why letting go of them can feel surprisingly difficult. After all, the very practice of ‘holding on’ is ingrained in us from childhood: “Don't give up”, “Keep in touch”, “Follow your dreams”. In a world where persistence is treated as a virtue, it is no wonder that letting go can sometimes feel like failure. And somewhere along the way, we began to confuse preserving something with proving its importance. But does something have to stay exactly as it was to have been real?

For instance, consider the relationships in our lives. Some end without a distinct goodbye; someone you once spoke to every day becomes someone you hear from once a month, and eventually someone whose life you only follow through a screen. That ambiguity can leave us grasping for a reason – if something was wrong, then moving on would feel justified. So we look for faults, revisit old arguments, or convince ourselves we were never really that close in the first place. But what if nothing went wrong? What if a friendship was good, and then we simply outgrew it? Something does not necessarily have to become ‘bad’ before we are allowed to let it go. Its ending does not diminish everything that came before it.

Perhaps the hardest relationship we learn to outgrow, is the one we have with ourselves. Over the years, I have kept journals from different phases of my life. Every so often, I stumble across one of these hardbound time capsules and am compelled to flip through its pages and meet a previous version of myself. However, I barely recognise the person behind those pages – that girl is certain about things I am unsure of now, anxious about problems I cannot even remember solving, and dreaming of a future I no longer want. Although revisiting your old writings is a humbling experience on its own, beneath the initial cringe is something much deeper: affection for a person I remember being but can never quite become again. We tend to think of growth as something only additive: gaining more knowledge, independence and experience. Yet growing up involves subtraction too. We outgrow habits, beliefs, and ambitions that we once thought would be permanent. But changes in our values or direction do not mean our younger selves were wrong or that our journey is invalidated. Even as we let go of who we once were, each version of us continues to live on in the person we become.

So perhaps this is what letting go asks of us – not forgetting something, but being at peace with it taking a different form. Think of all the little pieces of people from our past that subtly wove themselves into who we are: the favourite song an old friend introduced us to, the handwriting we picked up from a classmate, the mannerisms we unknowingly copied or the compliment we still carry with us. Some things stop staying with us and start staying in us instead; letting go simply means allowing them to. Maybe this acceptance is where the art of letting go lies. An artist could continue working on a painting indefinitely – touching up the edges, fine-tuning details or adding more strokes. But part of the process is also recognising when to put the brush down. While perseverance takes a great deal of courage, accepting that something is complete takes just as much.

The letters, tickets, stickers and cards still remain at the bottom of my drawer. I suspect that they will survive several more rounds of determined decluttering, but somehow, I don’t mind that anymore. The more interesting question was why I wanted to keep them – was it to keep a memory or to hold onto what they once represented? There is a difference between remembering the past and asking it to remain our present. Perhaps the real art of letting go is learning how to carry something softly, without needing it to stay the same.

So maybe minimalist decluttering isn’t the solution for me. Marie Kondo next?