In one article I read, a woman was packing up her mother’s things, getting ready to move her into a nursing home. Inside a bureau, she found the gifts she’d given her mother over the last few years—a beautiful nightgown, a scented candle, luxurious bath towels—still wrapped in tissue paper. “Mom,” she asked in bewilderment, “why didn’t you use the gifts I gave you?”
“I was saving them,” her mother answered.
I thought about that a lot. Saving them for what? For when life’s perfect? For a magical future day that never arrives?
At first, I felt pretty good about myself regarding this issue. I don’t have any items stashed away for later. I burn the candles I buy. We don’t have any towels I’d call “luxurious,” but we do use the ones we have. I do have wedding china on display in the china cabinet, but I get it out for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other important family events.
But then I realized that there is one item that I buy and then invariably put off using—new runnin
g shoes. I wait until my current pair’s about worn out, order a new pair, and when they come in, I let them sit in the closet. Sometimes for months. I mean, they’re so clean when they’re new, so shiny and white. So there they sit, and day after day I look at them, until finally I admit that my old shoes are causing my feet or my knees to hurt and realize how stupid it is to have good shoes that I refuse to wear.Reluctantly, I get them out of the closet and put them on, lace them up, and head out the door. And after a day or two, even sooner if it’s rainy, they don’t look so new anymore. And I survive.
Maybe there’s some deep Freudian thing going on here.
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