Recently, I found a blue velvet Crown Royal drawstring bag while going through a milk crate. Stuff that I’ve been lugging along with me for oh so many years.
The bag was mouse-eaten. Inside was foreign currency… bills and coins. And droppings galore.
Some of us of a certain vintage remember the times before Apple Pay, touchless transactions. When we traveled abroad and got back home, we’d have some loose change jingling in our pockets, a few colorful banknotes in our wallets.
Apparently, I had collected many trips worth.
I wondered why on earth I kept this bag and its contents all these years, and without much thought, I tossed it into Thursday’s trash. One less thing to pack for an upcoming move across the country.
And then on Saturday, I was awakened at 3 am by a chorus of inner gremlins. Self doubt Sam and Carl the Criticizer let loose: “WTF dude that bag of loose change was a a record of the many places you travelled to in your younger days you should have made something from that collection you’ve been carting around for 40 years decorate a table top make some craft project a family heirloom!!! And maybe dig up a few ‘oh now I remember something about that place, that trip’ to share with your two adult daughters”
But the trash truck had come and gone Friday morning.
Sam and Carl dared me to find the location of the dump and go spelunking to recover the discarded treasure.
I resisted. And the gremlins kept showing up before the birds, before the sun rise, whispering in my ear their “should haves….” And I felt regret.
Yes, that bag of foreign currency was a record of adventures that left marks, though not immediately visible on the surface of my lake of memories. Purchases made in markets I can barely recall. Tokens for subways, buses, and trains whose routes I’ve long forgotten. The jangling of possibility in my pocket as I wandered through places that shaped the person I was becoming. Nodes in a larger network of experiences.
I found myself thinking about a mosaic I could have made with the actual coins. Something tactile and beautiful. A memory object.
Again I resisted going looking for the town dump, and instead, collaborated with an AI image generator as a creative partner. A tweak or two to the prompt and voila… I’m not sure I could have done better with glue and grout. As a bonus, I avoided the mouse shit.
Sam and Carl have since piped down, and upon reflection, I see now they inadvertently revealed something about my spontaneous decision… and later remorse.
The discord I was feeling wasn’t really about foreign currency. It was about inherited patterns playing out in my own choices. My mother was an incessant tosser of things—always clearing, always purging. My father, a keeper of “you’ll never know when you’ll need it” items. I watched that conflict between them for years, never resolved, forever lurking at the dinner table like an uninvited guest.
Dad had a wooden crate of old washing machine motors under his workbench in the basement on Pine Street. Salvaged from the apartments he managed in the row house that contained my childhood home. I used to play with them as a kid, taking them apart to learn how they worked. They never went back together quite right, so I’d quietly dispose of the evidence. Once in a while he’d ask, “Have you seen…?” Did he actually have an inventory? I’d shrug and mumble something about not remembering, then quickly change the subject.
That Thursday afternoon, there I was, decades later, caught between those same impulses—my mother’s swift disposal, my father’s careful preservation. The mouse-eaten bag prompted a choice. In that moment, it felt like clearing. Later, it felt like a loss.
This pattern of strain around keeping versus releasing—I’ve seen it play out everywhere, especially in the companies I’ve worked with.
Organizations accumulate their own bags of mouse-eaten currency. Ancient “We should build this feature…” molding in backlogs, taking up mental bandwidth. Legacy systems we’re “definitely going to refactor someday.” Processes passed down from three reorganizations ago that nobody questions. Like my father’s washing machine motors under the workbench, we keep them because “you never know when you’ll need it.”
But every outdated user story, every zombie project shambling through backlog refinement and sprint planning, every residual tension we refuse to address—they all drain energy from what matters now. The keeper vs. tosser dynamic plays out in every prioritization meeting, every architectural decision, every time someone says “but we’ve always done it this way.”
Sometimes the most important leadership skill isn’t perfect judgment—it’s the ability to make a call, learn from it, and move forward without endless second-guessing. Even when you occasionally toss something you later wish you’d kept.
What memory objects are you carrying? What would happen if you let them go?
