How to throw out the "old"?

[peacetraveler22]

When I was young, my mother often told me stories about her difficult childhood. Ten kids growing up in a poor, rural region of Virginia, with an alcoholic dad and an exhausted/abused mother who was forced to raise all the children almost entirely on her own. Her father provided only a paycheck to the family, and little more. He spent long days working in the coal mines, and almost always came home drunk. I remember this man as my grandpa, and even in his older years he suffered from severe alcoholism. He was completely tied to the bottle and a horrible human, for whom I have absolutely no positive emotions, memories or feelings. The stories I remember most vividly from my mom are the ones where she had no shoes to wear, or ones that were so old and in disrepair that it was difficult to walk in the snow or on hard gravel. Her mother sewed almost all the kids' clothes and coats, and they wore them until they tore or fell apart. You can see the results of my grandma's hard work in this photo dated 1956, where my mom and some of her siblings are wearing her handmade clothes...

1. It is because of these stories that I can never throw any type of clothing or shoes away. When I recently moved from my apartment, I had so many clothes in my closet that I never wear. I didn't want to drag them along to another place to take up closet space, but in the U.S., it's very easy to donate such items to the less fortunate. You basically just need a car, some trash bags, and the desire to help. These "drop off" boxes sit in almost all neighborhoods, placed in convenient places like gas stations, Walmart parking lots, or other heavily trafficked areas and intersections. Simply throw the bags in the boxes while your gas is pumping, and leave with the pleasant feeling that someone else will now have a nice piece of clothing to wear.



2. Such boxes exist not only for donation of clothing, but also books and DVDs. Recently, I've seen these cute wooden boxes appearing in local neighborhoods. They're called "Little Free Libraries," where neighbors can take a book from a decorative box or leave one for someone else to read. A continual flow of knowledge and literature for the community...



3. Books and clothing - these are superficial and tangible items, which are much easier to discard. However, there are no such boxes to quickly dispose of negative human emotions or animosity. These feelings are especially complex when the subject of the negative energy is a family member, such as my grandfather. I struggled with these feelings of hate for many years, but as I got older, I began to understand that all humans are flawed in some ways, and the acceptable tolerance threshold for such flaws vary in scope and by person.

I look at photos of my mom's parents, like those below, where my grandma looked so happy and in love. How could it be, when she lived with an alcoholic who physically and verbally abused her? I still don't have the answers, but to live with anger and hate is poisonous for the mind, body and soul, so I stopped trying to understand.



Do you have these boxes in Russia? How do you get rid of old clothing, books, or negative human emotions?