Decluttering...

Photo by Lindsey LaMont on Unsplash

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I finally got round to migrating my contacts to my local phone, the process of downloading them from one account to a new one the last grudging act of acceptance at being here, a signal as it were of the finality of moving. It felt great to be able to do all I use my phone for - WhatsApp, podcasts, ebooks and all - from one device. What I did not bargain for was the trip down the rabbit hole of memory that exercise would be.

If you had asked me, I would have said I was great at moving on, never letting the detritus of the past hang around too long - this exercise put the lie to that. There were contacts from my Eket days, from Newcastle and every pit stop in between;  with a few very dead people in there. The longer I think about it, the more I suspect that finality is difficult, and keeping phone numbers of lost or atrophied connections is one last stand for hope against hope. It is a false hope of course. Although I haven’t called H’s number in years, P did a few years ago and found out the number had been reassigned to someone else, which given the time that has passed is reasonable.

One could argue that with the undead, the situation is much less nuanced. There seems to be little benefit of keeping contacts for people I haven’t spoken to in many years, especially in situations where the spheres and cycles we live in have significantly diverged. Sentimental attachments make the decision less clear cut for some though. I guess it doesn’t help when birthday wishes are still exchanged once a year (no thanks to the fortunate or unfortunate coincidence of sharing a birthday).

I took the opportunity to clean up my contacts and remove a number of these dead and lost connections. H, E and F remain. Ridding my contacts of their numbers - even if those might have been reassigned to someone else - seemed a bridge too far this time. Maybe someday in 2030, I’ll finally bring myself to do that.

Speaking of the dead, I found this interview with Fabrice Muamba on the subject of those 78 minutes fascinating, not least for his thoughts on faith and community and how it helped him pull through the dark days after his cardiac event when it became obvious his footballing career was over. Well worth a listen if I say so myself.