Blast to the Past

About a week or so ago, I pulled out an old tub that was full of old school stuff. Mostly high school. It was all my notebooks, notes, some homework, old tests, articles, projects. Pretty much everything I ever collected throughout high school with a little bit of jr. high and elementary mixed in.

It ended up taking me over an hour to go through that one tub. A lot of it, I looked at and thought “why am I keeping this? I don’t care what grade I got on that history homework and I don’t really care about these notes from math.” I ended up recycling a lot of papers and trashing my old, fallen apart binders and folders.

Goodbye tests. Goodbye homework. Goodbye math notes.

Now, I probably could’ve kept my notes for reflection purposes. Reteach myself what I learned in school back then. Be the wiz I used to be, but let’s face it. I’m not going to go through the chemistry and biotechnology notes or reflect on the lab we did counting these little stem thingies on a plant. Sure, the anatomy stuff, I’ll probably save, but algebra’s gone out the door a long time ago.

I had several piles surrounding me as I went through this tub. Trash, recycle, undecided, keep, random non-school thing, etc. You want to know what ended up in my keep pile?

Art. Poems. Doodles. Creative writings I did outside of Class. And most importantly, the unused pages of the notebooks.

Looking through my school stuff, what I valued most was the creations I made instead of the knowledge I learned. I even got frustrated when flipping through my notebooks. I had some subject notebooks that were only used for a few pages or still had half the notebook unused. It drove under my skin that these perfectly good notebooks weren’t used all the way through because they contained school notes.

I like to say “There’s nothing scarier than a blank piece of paper,” because a blank piece of paper is untapped potential and these notebooks were full of them.

So, I ripped out the notes.

I took out every page that didn’t have something I cared about on it and fed those pages to the recycle bin. All that’s left of my school tub is a stack of art. The notebooks are sitting on my desk, ready to have purpose again.

Do you have anything from your high school days? Any notes or tests or projects you held onto? Why did you keep them? I thought it was interesting how I cared more about my doodles and creative writings than I did my notes. I’m sure there’s probably people out there who would be the opposite. Maybe some of you only kept one subject and trashed the rest?

Kind of a cool reminder that we’re all unique.