Styrofoam

Today I was sorting through junk. Well, to be honest, it wasn't all junk. There were a few reasonable craft supplies, some paints, and household tools amidst the junk. Mostly, though, it was scraps of felt and paper, sheets of cardboard spray-painted with teenaged heartbreak, a few forgotten Skittles, and chunks of styrofoam ranging in size from 1 square inch to 3 feet long. What was once a room for organized storage and table tennis had morphed to a craft room and later to a garbage dump, and it's time to reverse the morphing process, so I dove in.

It was easy to decide what to do with most of the stuff: it was sorted and tossed into boxes, bins, or the garbage cans. But the styrofoam stymied me. My son, now 18, had once had a passion for building terrain and painting miniature action features. He collected styrofoam and would meticulously (and miraculously) transform it into battlefields or bridges or even medieval forests. He is the type of person who never likes to throw things away, and even though his craft no longer calls to him, he can't let go of all the supplies. Not even the chunks of blue and white styrofoam he's collected from construction sites and electronic product cartons. I wondered how I could justify throwing out somebody else's trash.

As I worked, I began to feel like I was living a metaphor. We all start out fresh and organized, anxious to build our lives with the tools available and collecting materials every day to grow and succeed. But as time wears on and mistakes are made and new paths are forged, some of the tools and materials fall by the wayside. If we hang onto them, they start to feel like junk. But sometimes it's hard to let go.

We could be talking here about communication styles, or how we approach our daily work. We could be talking about how we take care of ourselves, or how we relate to our loved ones. We could be talking about personality styles. However you look at it, we all develop skills and traits as we grow and mature, but sometimes they morph into bad habits and counterproductive behaviors. Like those pieces of styrofoam, they really won't serve a purpose and just get in the way.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the hurt locker, where we collect in our memory those things that have tried to hurt us in the past. Now I'm thinking about another intangible collection: those behaviors we have that need to be looked at and sorted and purged. Just as I can look at my son's styrofoam and shake my head, thinking he really needs to get rid of that junk, I find I can identify other people's behaviors that serve no purpose or, even worse, interfere with a productive life. But the hard part is identifying my own styrofoam, my own behaviors that need to be scrutinized.

What about you? Think of a recent experience where the outcome of an interaction didn't end satisfactorily. Which of your behaviors contributed to it? Are these leftover remnants from your past, that no longer serve you? Ought they be crumbled up like styrofoam bits and tossed in the trash?

Now write about it.