Consider What You're Throwing Away

I recently came across a humorous but thought provoking story by Michael Chabon called "Disposable Memories," in which he recounts the many times he has crumpled, tossed or recycled a piece of his children's artwork -- and they few times he has been caught red-handed.

It happened to me...three or four times, maybe more.

Children are art factories. We have bin upon Rubbermaid bin of marked up paper, glued down yarn, twisted pipe cleaners, glops of glitter and pencil rubbings. I mean, seriously, you can't save it all, right? Every random squiggle, polka dot and scribble. Some of it just has to go, so we play curator over the trash can after they empty their backpack then look the other way.

Chabon says:

I'm not trying to excuse the act of throwing my children's artwork away. The crookedest mark of a colored pencil on the back of a bank-deposit envelope...is like a bright, stray trace of the boundless pleasure I take in watching my kids interact with the world. The set of processes joining their minds to their fingertips is a source of profound interest and endless speculation, a mystery...I know that if I live long enough, a time will come when their childhoods will strike me as having been mythically brief. Almost nothing will remain of these days, and they will be women and men, and I will look back on the lost piles of their drawings and paintings and sketches...and rue my barbarism. I will be haunted by the memory of the way my younger daughter looks at me when she chances upon a crumpled sheet of paper in the recycling bin, bearing the picture, the very portrait, of five minutes stolen from the headlong rush of their little hour in my care.

Only it's not just her artwork that I'm busy throwing away. Almost every hour that I spend with my children is disposed of just as surely, tossed aside, burned through like money by a man on a spree...the truth is that in every way I am squandering the treasure of my life...every day is like a child's drawing, offered to you with a strange mixture of ceremoniousness and offhand disregard, yoursd for the keeping. Some of them are rich and complicated, others inscrutable, others barely more than a stray gray mark on a ragged page. Some of them you manage to hang on to...but most of them you just ball up and throw away.

In managing life's challenges, we learn to block and tackle, quickly make decisions and prioritize one thing over the next to get the job done, so it's easy to understand why we don't easily recognize life's little moments.

I'll continue to save only those masterpieces that really strike me. And I'll be more mindful that every day with my children, like their creative drawings, is a gift.