The Blue Carabiner
After almost 20 years, I finally switched carabiners.
I attended a career day when I was in middle school. Several local companies came to my school and did presentations. At the time, I thought architecture sounded like fun, so I sat in on one done by an architecture firm. I’ve always loved maps and floorplans and building design. There’s something artistically fascinating about the many ways man-made spaces can be planned and developed.
Every company that presented at this career day brought free, branded swag with them, and I took a simple blue carabiner with the architecture firm’s name on it. It became the carabiner I used every day to hold my first house key. It eventually held car keys, church keys, and multiple decorative fobs and dongles over the years. It got banged up and scratched from daily use, but it did its job.
Keys came and went from that carabiner as I became an adult, completed college, and eventually got my own place. The keys are completely different now than they were when I was a teenager and younger adult. I now live in a different house, have a different car, and have newer keys to buildings at the church where I serve as a part-time associate pastor. The old keys represented different seasons of my life, and it has always been surreal to be given a new one or to take one off the carabiner for good.
Eventually, the carabiner began to wear out. The spring loosened and the gate opened more easily. Several times, I lost keys for brief periods of time because the gate would accidentally open when I wasn’t paying attention and let them slip off.
Recently I decided it was time to retire my old carabiner and replace it with a new one that has a more secure gate as a main feature. Switching all my keys to this new carabiner felt odd, like I was leaving part of my old self behind. It was a similar, if lesser, feeling to the one I had when I left my childhood home for the last time or surrendered the keys of my old car to the person who bought it from me.
Life changes can often be marked by the simplest things. Looking at my old carabiner brings back memories of who I was as a kid, a boy who did not become an architect but did have big dreams for his future. Some of those dreams have been realized. Others have not. Still others have evolved or been replaced with new ones. Some of the keys that are now on my carabiner actually represent the fulfillment of some of those dreams, like having my own house and being a leader in my church.
I value the past, even when it’s painful. The past can teach us a lot if we’re willing to face it and learn from it. It’s not necessarily an indication of the future, even though patterns often repeat, but I hope that memories of my past can inform my future decisions in positive ways. Some of things I valued as a kid are still worth valuing today, even if I forgot them or set them aside for a time.
It’s also good to move forward. I’m glad I now have a carabiner that will be secure enough to hold my keys without me having to fear losing them. After all, the keys on my new carabiner represent things that are important to me now.
Letting go of something old that served me well is tough but meaningful, even if it’s only a freebie carabiner from a grade school career day event. But I’m glad I’ve replaced it with something new that will work even better.