My mom bought me purple flowered gym shorts over twenty years ago. I remember opening up the gift on a Christmas morning—a running ensemble. I’ve long lost the tank top and socks, but the shorts somehow endured. I can’t believe I’ve held onto them as long as I have. The shorts are older than my marriage.
They’ve carried me through many runs on many different trails and have stayed in relatively great shape despite countless rounds through the washing machine. The waist drawstring snaked its way out years ago, but the elastic held firm until yesterday morning.
As soon as I started jogging on our downstairs treadmill, I sensed the shorts slipping down. I rolled the waist band a few times to try to keep it up, but that didn’t work. Thank goodness I was in my own basement and not a crowded gym. I couldn’t go on, and neither could the shorts.
It was time to retire them. I can run with stains or tears or frays, but I certainly can’t run in shorts that fall down. Nobody needs to see that.
I held them in my hands, ready to toss them, but paused with a bit of gratitude for a rare item of clothing that had really gone the distance.
The shorts won’t work for me going forward, but I can look back and appreciate that I really got some good mileage out of them.
They worked for me for a long time, but now they no longer work.
Isn’t the same true for so many other things?
Relationships. Jobs. Systems. Practices. Philosophies. Attitudes. Attachments.
We all have things, things we’ve depended on for a long time. Even decades. They serve a purpose for us. They meet a need. They fill a hole.
So we take care of things like these. We wash them, we mend them, we keep them close. We turn to them over and over and over again.
But there comes a day when they’re no longer viable. When they’ve been too worn down and used. When they no longer have the elastic to keep up with our ever-moving, ever-evolving selves.
There comes a day we need something new. Because the old no longer fits.
And it’s okay to loosen our grip on the old things and toss them aside.
But maybe we take a moment with whatever it is, whatever kind of shorts we’ve been wearing for a really long time, and give thanks.
Thanks for getting me here. It’s been a great run. But now I need something that fits a little better.
Interested in object-based storytelling? My memoir, Piece by Piece: A Life Remembered through Things Lost, is available here. 📖💙
