Metacognition: Get Organized

It was the Tuesday night before break and I had a flight to catch that required me to wake up at 3AM. "Hurry up and get all your packing done!" my dad said. Unfortunately, my typical procrastinating self hadn't even opened my suitcase. I instead decided it would be a good time to replace procrastination with productivity and start working on this blog post. I'll make my blog assignment easy on myself and just sort through my records, I thought. As I started sifting through the records, I not only got a few facefuls of dust, but got bored of trying to be neat. Dejectedly, I took a couple of my favorite records back to my rooom and attempted to at least sort those few. But as I got more and more into the project, I ended up completely reorganizing my room.

Not only is my room slightly less cluttered, but my mind is too. It's easier to focus on your priorities when you aren't distracted by your surroundings. We tend to get caught up with computers and work and friends. And once it's all simplified, the stress eases away and the way is paved to focus on what is really important to you at that given point in time.

At the beginning of the year we read "Memoria ex Machina" where the author talked about how he associated memories with objects from his past. This project forced me to look at the memories I associate with my own objects, particularly with art and music. I can recall the exact moment I first heard a song just by hearing the opening chord--I was sick the Christmas I played track 3, I still hated that album until I heard the 4th song, the first track played that time when I had slammed my door in some sort of angry cry for attention. And there's something memorable about the anticipation of the waiting for a record I haven't heard in a while to start playing, waiting for those memories to come back. The needle is set, the record is spinning, and any moment the first track will sound.

On my quest for a cleaner room I found a small plastic box with a ladybug sticker on the side. I had stuffed the box with old drawings and paintings and sketchpads.
I always took it for granted that those types of memories would always be there when I wanted to look back on my history. I thought could just start listening to a record I forgot I owned or flip through old sketchbooks with drawings from a wannabe troubled artist middle schooler and I would remember everything. But the longer the records stayed untouched and the drawings started to stick together, the more dust everything collected. I don't remember exactly what I was thinking or how I was feeling when I painted that picture. Maybe something about it seems silly looking back, but it was meaningful to me at the time. Though I can't recall what the meaning once was, something about it had an impact on how I grew to be who I am today.

And to future me, reminiscing on this blog--go listen to some of those old records. You never know what you'll remember.