The Life of a Drawer

What is the life of a drawer? To hold clothes? Office supplies? Toys? Or is it an archeological repository - the miscellaneous stuff of a busy life, looked in rarely? Perhaps it may hold treasures of one kind or another, such as journals that trace the arc of a life, or favorite clothes that bring joy and pleasure. And of course, drawers may simply become repositories of things rarely needed or wanted - half-completed projects, piles of journals, stuff that gets put away simply to tidy up the house. In this way, drawers help us organize our material world in one way or another.

Drawers also offer us a useful metaphor for our inner lives. Imagine all the useful and meaningful things our minds and hearts hold within us and keep close to us – our knowledge, our memories, our wisdom and gratitude, our joys and sorrows, our playfulness and skills. We especially treasure and hold close the love we feel for the dear ones in our lives, and the many moments we have shared with them.

And what about our less-opened drawers, the inner "bottom drawers" that we don't want to think about? How might we clean them out and transform their contents into something more pleasing in them - forgiveness, hope, and peace?

The contents of these drawers may be well known, but we don’t really want to look at them. Someday, perhaps, we will decide to peer inside, take out what’s there, and see it as it is. Perhaps it needs to be seen, and, seeing it, we will become something more beautiful.

We won’t know until we look inside.

*******

When I decided that it was past time to write another post, I realized that I had no idea what I would write about. So I resorted to my tried-and-true way of getting started: I looked in my Mac's "Photo" program and began looking through my photographs (all 26,256 of them, going back to 2007) to see what might spark my imagination. I chose this image because it was both attractive and it had a metaphorical quality to it - a closed drawer with an evocative drawer pull, as well as beautiful wood.

I waited for a title or opening line to come to me to get me started, and it occurred to me to that drawers are often an integral aspect of our daily lives, and, as such, have a life of sorts themselves. Why not be more conscious of it? So I imagined what kinds of "life" they have, and as I did, I felt gratitude for all they do for us.