Left Behind Things

On my walk this morning, my attention was drawn to an old rowboat resting upside down on its trailer. It was in the side yard of a house in the neighborhood.

It has been there for a long time, perhaps twenty years. My sense is that it has been resting idle for most of those years. On every one of my walks, it has been resting there. It has a forlorn look to it, and there is a lot of rust on it.

This made me think about all of the things once precious and exciting in our lives, things that have since been left behind.

We outgrow things. We grow and develop new interests, and other things get left behind.

They are perfectly useful, but they no longer hold our interest.

I know that I hang onto things that I have actually left behind. Sometimes this is a conscious choice, but more often it is my failure to acknowledge that I have moved on.

When I moved to the country thirty years ago, I acquired a 26 horsepower tractor to use for a large variety of tasks on my property. I loved everything about that tractor.

I loved that I lived where I needed a real tractor, and not just a small lawn-mowing tractor.

I loved the power of that tractor, and all the things I could do with it. I loved the sound of it, and I loved how it felt when I drove it.

I loved its orange color, and I loved caring for it: changing the oil, and lubing its joints.

Last year, I realized that my beloved tractor had been sitting forlorn and unused in my barn for a long time. I just didn’t do the kinds of things that it had once helped me with.

I had let most of my property go wild and native, so I wasn’t mowing big parts of the five acres like I used to do. The meadows had been overtaken by young woods, and I no longer had big clearing jobs.

I was no longer pulling up stumps of old oaks that had died; I just let them rot and eventually become homes for the wildlife. And, I no longer tilled a swath for a large vegetable garden every year.

My neighbor Brian now plows the snow off the driveway, so I don’t even need to do that anymore with the tractor.

I reluctantly acknowledged that the tractor that had faithfully served me for so many years was now a Left Behind Thing.

I gave the tractor to Brian. He has a half dozen farms, and I knew it was going to a good home.

It took me a long time to consciously acknowledge that I had moved on, not only from the tractor, but from the “me” who did those tractor things. I was really reluctant to let that part of myself go. I felt like I was letting go a part of the dream I had when I moved to the country, and that I had lived for so long.

But I was making different choices now, and the tractor wasn’t part of them. Just like the rowboat in the side yard is no longer a part of my neighbor’s dreams or life.

I like to think that these things are happier when they are freed to go and do what they were designed to do. My tractor wasn’t meant to sit in my barn; it was meant to go and be a tractor, and to be useful, just like any of us.

So, when I can’t or don’t love to use things anymore, I feel like it is time to release them, and to be happy for them that they can go and fulfill their purpose somewhere else.

But before I can do that, I need to acknowledge that I have moved on, that I am making different choices, and that I have left behind the thing that was once precious.

This isn’t always easy for me. It always takes consciousness about what matters. Sometimes it takes courage to let a prior version of ourselves go too.

What are your Left Behind Things?