I'm moving from one apartment to another in Lisbon and it occurred to me that, besides being a very stressful ordeal (talking about stress again...) it's also an opportunity to rid ourselves of enormous quantities of ...things that we insist on carrying for years and years. Incredibly, I even found papers, etc that remained exactly in the same unopened bags since my previous moving. Like mummies in layers.
A friend of mine, who is emptying his old family house in the Azores, from where he comes, in order to sell it, used the following words to describe that painful process: "I must make thrash out of those memories and then get rid of it".
Perhaps we acquire and then keep too many things. We should make ourselves lighter. Old age may be that too: carrying an awfully heavy ballast to give the illusion of stability. It works in scuba diving - I'm not sure carrying all this weight around works in life.