Do you ever wonder where you end and your physical tangible possessions begin?
Some time ago I came to the conclusion that I had too much stuff. I was determined to get rid of much of it, to make room for more stuff and, more than anything, be able to utilise the space I live in more effectively.
I decided some days ago I would get rid of all the books I had on HTML, web design and web usability. I had little need of any of these books and hadn’t really looked at any of them in at least six months. But here’s the thing… they’re all still in the same place on the bookshelf – they have not moved at all.
I might as well just tell you, I have an irrational fear about ‘stuff.’ I tend to think of my belongings as actually being a part of myself and my personality. I mean, if a tree falls in the forest and there are no knick-knacks belonging to me around the fallen tree, will anyone realise my corpse is stuck underneath it?
[I think we just reached a new level of warped in the history of this blog. Go John!]
Oh it gets worse! I also have a folder completely full of pages about a Windows program I wrote in high school (including the program’s source code). There is no obvious reason to keep it. I don’t feel any great nostalgia for it. Its not like I couldn’t reproduce the program from scratch if I needed to. Still, it sits awkwardly where I last looked at it.
Perhaps I am just a hoarder.
At any rate I have made some progress. I threw out an assortment of 3.5 inch floppy disks I had amassed. I shredded a collection of ‘morning pages’ from 2002. I had already donated a heap of other books – all my herbal medicine and gardening books, especially. I worry that despite what I’ve achieved thus far, this space really isn’t much more functional than it was before I started. I realise, intellectually, it’s a process. But at the time of writing it doesn’t feel like a particularly fruitful one.
Tomorrow however I will follow through. Those books shall be gone. Hopefully the space will be more useful and less cluttered. And who knows, I might even be less neurotic. Stranger things have happened!
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Like I said, watch out for those forests… I actually once wrote a poem about the Tallest trees being the evil ones… I can’t remember how it goes, but lol that doesn’t matter. Actually I quite like this blog entry… new levels of warped? Push that envelope and see how much farther it goes
You still had floppy discs?
Steves last blog post..Addictions…