Fuelling Fulfilment

The day my history became smoke

On July 17th, 2010, I burned all my old schoolbooks, and I believe it changed my life.

I remember the date because it was a scorcher and the day after my eldest son’s second birthday. While clearing up after his party, I decided to incinerate the wrapping paper, empty boxes, and paper cups rather than stuffing them into plastic sacks. I had some old fencing to dispose of anyway, so it made sense to combine the two.

With the inferno lit, I began feeding the metal drum. As the flames licked the air, I nipped to the shed for more fodder. We’d only moved in the previous year, and several unopened containers were still waiting for exploration.

Into the embers went the contents: cards from former girlfriends, battered books, and tatty tea towels. Some socks, magazine recipes, more boxes, a print of construction workers lunching on a skyscraper beam, and old HMRC correspondence. General stuff of little importance.

But then, I hit a state of flow.

I became obsessed with finding things to burn. If it looked like it would smoke, into the blaze it went. Bits of string, rotting skipping ropes - a host of redundant relics I had little recollection of owning.

Just as the game was nearing its end, I found a large, dented cardboard box with “Simon’s Schoolwork” scrawled across the top, disintegrated parcel tape hanging from the edges. The writing was too neat to be mine; I concluded it must have been my mother’s.

Opening the box, I felt an instant regression. I was a carefree child again. There were old art pads, GCSE science papers, English coursework (an A+, in case you were wondering), French (an E), history books, House Point records, and sports certificates.

I sat in that shed for ages, poring over the papers and reclaiming my forgotten youth. Those were the days when life seemed so complicated but wasn’t - not in the grand scheme. Days of banter, sarcasm in the corridors, and kids scurrying through the halls. Playground football, grass football, classroom football. Any football.

I wasn’t too shabby at the learning, either. Perhaps that’s why my mum had boxed it up and kept it in the loft all that time. “Something to show your children when they’re older,” she would have said.

But as my mind returned to the present, I realized that what lay strewn before me was simply clutter. It was a heavy box of a bygone time, destined to sit prone in the shed until we moved again. I knew how it would go: years from now, we’d be reacquainted, the musing would recycle, and by then, my children would be far too old to care how artistic their dad once was.

This piece of life’s tapestry served no purpose. It took up physical space and filled my head with whimsical waste. It was pointless - and certainly needless.

Within minutes, my secondary education was fluttering as ash into the neighbour’s garden. Later, as I watched the embers glow dim, a rush of satisfaction coursed through me. I felt enlightened; my world felt lighter.

It might sound mad, even merciless, to so rapidly dispose of something that had followed me since my teens. But it made me feel invigorated and unshackled. Life is often loaded with lumber - a trudge through treacle - and those encumbered by the weight of things they don’t need find they have less space for the things that really matter.

But that is a topic for another time.