Walking Mends My Mind

A Publication by Gary @ Blog Fae The Bog

Welcome to Blog Fae The Bog Getting the Sh*t Oot Ma Head

If you’re looking for a mix of random topics, light-hearted nonsense, and the occasional pointless ramble, you’ve come to the right place.

Welcome back to the next instalment of Blog Fae The Bog. I’m Gaz—a writer, keen poet, habitual journaler, and a general scribbler of any old sh*te that happens to spring to mind.

Fair Warning: Please only read my blog if you are not easily offended. If you are, please read something else! 

The Shoebox Afterlife: A Reflection on Loss, Legacy, and What We Leave Behind. While the passing of my mother is still incredibly raw, I find myself sitting in the quiet spaces she left behind, caught in a loop of heavy contemplation. It forces a question we often try to outrun

Is this the ultimate truth of human existence? There is a quiet, almost heartbreaking vulnerability in realizing how quickly our physical footprints shrink down to the size of a cardboard box.

Piece by Piece, We Fade: In the days and weeks following a loss, the physical world demands your attention. You find yourself sorting, categorizing, and letting go. Every tip run, every charity shop donation feels like a slow dismantling of a life.

Piece by piece, item by item, another little part of a person slowly fades away from the physical world. Eventually, the cupboards are bare, the shelves are cleared, and there is nothing left apart from thoughts and memories, bringing us face-to-face with what I’ve come to call the Shoebox Afterlife.

When it’s all said and done, a person’s whole physical existence amounts to:

 A few faded, old photographs.

 A pile of papers waiting for the shredder.

 A small collection of items handed down through the generations.

Everything you were, everything you felt, and everything you built ultimately fits into something no bigger than a shoebox. And what’s more sobering is the math of time after just two generations, the likelihood is that we will be almost entirely erased from conscious memory.

A Different Way to Look at It; It’s an incredibly heavy feeling to carry. But as I sit with my grief, I’ve realized you can always choose to look at it a more positive way. So if you need a little comfort against that weight, consider this, while our possessions shrink, and our impact ripples out in ways we can’t see.

You might be “erased” from the conscious memory of the future, but your energy is woven into the DNA and habits of the people who follow your footsteps.

Our physical things will always fade, and the shoebox will eventually be misplaced, lost or thrown out, but the love, the resilience, and the energy we pour into the world by our sheer existence well, that becomes part of the fabric and dna of the future.

We don’t live on in things; we live on in the people who carry our echo.

“That moment in time when you realise that nothing you have achieved in life actually matters, because when the time comes all you become is a statistic”

©️G J Meldrum