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Letting Go: I Threw the Smelly Blanket Away

Today,
when I took out the trash,
I threw the smelly blanket away.

The stinky beige blanket has been lying on the floor in my dining room for over a year waiting for me to take it to the laundromat to wash it. It was too big and smelly to put in the top loader. After discussing the subject with my sister and then meditating on it, I decided the best course of action was to throw the damn thing away. Since I have not forced myself to take it to the laundromat before now, I am not going to do it. This morning, with the waning gibbous leering down at me, I took the blanket to the garage and put it in the black plastic rolling trashcan. I then rolled the trash to the curb for the garbage disposal engineers to dump into their truck.

I feel relieved not to have to worry about taking the blanket to the laundromat and then figuring out how to fix the seam that is coming apart on the blanket's top edge. I suspect throwing the blanket away was a symbolic act. It was letting go of the past and accepting that there are things I do not have to hold onto anymore. I do not know why I did not throw the blanket away last year, I do not (or did not) think I had an emotional attachment to it. It was just a blanket that Larry the Yardman gave me because for some reason he got the idea that we were family. I did not consider him family, I do not even remember his last name.

Maybe the blanket had a metaphorical meaning and throwing it away was a metaphorical act rather then a symbolic act. Since the blanket had no special religious or personal significance metaphorical may be a better description. Anyway the blanket is in the trashcan that is sitting by the curb today and I am not taking it out of the trash. Throwing the blanket away may not have been the green thing to do, but it was the right thing.

Thought of the Day: “We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it's a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it.” - Andrei Tarkovsky