Clutter

Today I sat with my mom and cleaned my college room. And I realized I was a hoarder! I just have too much stuff in the small hostel room of mine. And most of it is pretty useless, just sitting in the corner, accumulating dust, occupying space. I did not have any reason to have them there, adding to the existing clutter in my room, but they just had to be there. My mom would throw these things and I would quietly put some of them back in my pocket. And she just could not understand why! At the beginning neither could I.

While cleaning out my room, something I realized was that this junk, crap in my room, wasn't just random useless stuff lying around. It was memories I had accumulated over the last 3.5 years in my college. This "junk" was my college. I had a pair of broken sunglasses from a road trip I took with my friends a year ago, I had the department ID card from my first ever Waves (our cultural fest), a drink stirrer from one of the many many nights, stolen shot glasses and the list goes on!When I look around my room I don't just see a mess and things strewn about (well that is hard to miss :P ) but I see my whole college life surrounding me, and somehow during my last year here it is comforting. All of these things have a story behind them. And a great one too.

Here is one for you, I call it "The stolen shot glasses". Well, this semester most of my friends are off campus doing their awesome internships and me being a dual degree, I'm back here. So I started hanging out with some old acquaintances. And it was fun. So one night, one of then had a birthday and four of us went out to celebrate, and since it was my friend's 21st bday, we had the socially acceptable amount of alcohol. I won't go into the details of the celebration. Towards the end, I just made a remark that the shot glasses were very pretty. And to my surprise, when we came back to campus, the other three had "picked" one up for me! So when I look at that sitting on the shelf, it reminds me of this story and makes me smile!

Similarly we all have clutter in our rooms, in our lives. Clutter we can't really let go, because it reminds us of the times we've had, the road-trips, the random outings, the late nights, the fights and then eventual patch-up, bit by bit, they make up life!