[no] looking back
Melinda and I are, in effect, just about to move. We're not actually moving till the end of August, but we'll be away for enough of the intervening time that this is our last weekend in the old place. Because of that I've been doing a lot of throwing out. Mostly it's been academic material, and that feels very, very weird.
I threw out a load of printouts of papers that are available online, many of which I would still be interested to read. It underscored something I'd more or less realised before: even though I'm entirely convinced I made the right decision by quitting my PhD, one of my remaining regrets is that making that choice amounted to accepting that I would never again have anywhere near as much time to read scientific papers as I used to, and that is something I do miss.
Going through old class notes was an entirely different experience. I have no regrets at all about dumping that stuff, but looking through it brings back all kinds of memories, from the miserable (the class that I probably couldn't have handled anyway, but lost any chance of keeping up with when my house sprang a persistent leak and I had to move mid-semester) right through to classes I enjoyed taking both for the material and the people involved.
The whole thing feels like formally closing a chapter of my life, and that part is deeply satisfying.
I threw out a load of printouts of papers that are available online, many of which I would still be interested to read. It underscored something I'd more or less realised before: even though I'm entirely convinced I made the right decision by quitting my PhD, one of my remaining regrets is that making that choice amounted to accepting that I would never again have anywhere near as much time to read scientific papers as I used to, and that is something I do miss.
Going through old class notes was an entirely different experience. I have no regrets at all about dumping that stuff, but looking through it brings back all kinds of memories, from the miserable (the class that I probably couldn't have handled anyway, but lost any chance of keeping up with when my house sprang a persistent leak and I had to move mid-semester) right through to classes I enjoyed taking both for the material and the people involved.
The whole thing feels like formally closing a chapter of my life, and that part is deeply satisfying.