Chapel Speeches and "Stuff"

Still trying to make something of my state of mind, reading Sue Monk Kidd's "When the Heart Waits"--about her mid-life crisis, but it applies just as well to the crisis of entering The Third Age, or some major life transition and questioning. I kept thinking of a chapel speech I gave, on my birthday, around age 40, about mid-life crisis, Dante's "dark wood" that he wrote at the beginning of the "The Divine Comedy" (beginning of the Inferno), when he was age 37-42. Going into the crisis is an inferno, and coming out must be like paradiso....never thought about it like that.

So, being in the house but not on duty in the morning today, I got out my chapel speech file to find that one, and put the whole mess in order. I had wanted to have them printed up and bound in a book (I even got a how-to manual on handmade books Japanese-style) to give key people before I left, and I never did it. Now I really see what a job it would be (should have done it then when I could have gotten former students to help type/translate!!). Anyway, it turns out that I have 30 chapel speeches in my file, 15 of which are in Japanese. From 1976 to 1996. I am sure that is not all of them, but just the ones I still have. So I sorted, and threw out extra stuff not needed, and kept the speeches and a little of the extra stuff. I still wish I would "publish" them . . . but more than that. I wondered about not remembering the start and end (how useful a journal would be!)--I sort of think I remember feeling that I was "accepted" even if the "wrong" religion in '76, and that something stopped my being asked in the late 90s.

Anyhow, a larger question arose....."stuff." I felt very "attached" to those 30 speeches, and looked through all of them, some a lot because of reordering and getting items together that had been scattered. They are a link in my "identity." As is all the other "stuff" I am still holding on to because I have a place to keep it for the moment. So the crossroads is coming---what to do with the "stuff"---will I get to enough enlightenment not to need it, to have an identity without it, to know that no one else will ever read it and understand me, and throw it away wholesale? Will I hang on to it, believing it is "me" and someone else will throw it out wholesale? What is its role in my life at I start towards age 70? Where will I keep it? What is its real position in my life?

Of course the ideal would be to retire to a place to live and muse and browse through and read and share and toss. But the ideal ain't the reality. So, a question that has been looming since six months after I got here almost three years ago.....and looms a little bigger and with a longer shadow now: what to do with the "stuff." One item of crone wisdom I have never seen anyone talk about.