on thinking outside the box
This is a two-part post. The first part, in brief, is just to note that I have removed 4 boxes of books from the house. I have to note it because you can't really tell. I have the books doublestacked on the shelves, so even after removing so many books, the shelves still look full.
I sold one box worth of books for about $40 and the other 3 for about $10 apiece. I would never go to half-price books without first exhausting all other convenient options, and since I regularly drive near 3 other bookstores that pay more, they get the first pick.
In my decluttering journey, one thing that occurred to me this week is that I'm in a sense, re-writing history or perhaps memory. In other words, my memory is visual and tied to the things I own. If I don't own them, I probably soon won't remember that I ever did. I also won't remember a lot of related events. For example, I can look at a book and tell you when I got it, why I got it, and perhaps where I was reading it. It's very tied to that book. The same book with a different cover simply won't do. I actually have more than one set of duplicate books, and both books have two different memories attached.
I remake myself all the time. I acknowledge I change, intentionally or not. I try new things. I grow. But I have never remade myself by losing my history before.
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I have a multitool living in my canoe's emergency kit. Just in case I'm capsized and have lost everything except for the canoe. (The emergency kit is strapped to the canoe seat)
Its twin (which goes to show you what sort of multitool this is. Because the good kind doesn't come in packs of 2) lives in my car camping kitchen box. Just in case I'm car camping and for some reason need a multitool.
The reason this came up is twofold - 1) for the past year I've been struggling with the inevitable "where the hell is my X" that comes from compartmentalized living (here's my canoe stuff, here's my car camping stuff) and 2) its predictable result (forgetting my X because it's living in the wrong box, taking twice as long to pack because my belongings have to be reassembled from their component bits, having two of everything because it just happened to make sense at the time - and yet never having anything because it's too hard to get to).
As I mentioned, change is inevitable and while I may have been compartmentalized in the past, my life is moving more in the direction where stuff is starting to blend, and a significant place this is happening is in the area of "survival" tools - not so much in the case of surviving an apocalypse but more in the case of "I need a bungie to tie down a box" - where more and more of my life demands that I have a knife (for example) or a screwdriver (very much more likely) and with the addition of saddlebags to my motorcycle, it has finally come to this: a specific subset of tools which are used in camping/hiking/backpacking are also needed for work and the motorcycle, at which point I may as well start carrying them everywhere.
Which means that in addition to doing the keys/wallet/phone/building pass patdown every morning, I have a bag of tools to keep track of. So what is the smallest bag of tools I can get away with? Let the guessing game begin.
I sold one box worth of books for about $40 and the other 3 for about $10 apiece. I would never go to half-price books without first exhausting all other convenient options, and since I regularly drive near 3 other bookstores that pay more, they get the first pick.
In my decluttering journey, one thing that occurred to me this week is that I'm in a sense, re-writing history or perhaps memory. In other words, my memory is visual and tied to the things I own. If I don't own them, I probably soon won't remember that I ever did. I also won't remember a lot of related events. For example, I can look at a book and tell you when I got it, why I got it, and perhaps where I was reading it. It's very tied to that book. The same book with a different cover simply won't do. I actually have more than one set of duplicate books, and both books have two different memories attached.
I remake myself all the time. I acknowledge I change, intentionally or not. I try new things. I grow. But I have never remade myself by losing my history before.
---------------------------------------------------
I have a multitool living in my canoe's emergency kit. Just in case I'm capsized and have lost everything except for the canoe. (The emergency kit is strapped to the canoe seat)
Its twin (which goes to show you what sort of multitool this is. Because the good kind doesn't come in packs of 2) lives in my car camping kitchen box. Just in case I'm car camping and for some reason need a multitool.
The reason this came up is twofold - 1) for the past year I've been struggling with the inevitable "where the hell is my X" that comes from compartmentalized living (here's my canoe stuff, here's my car camping stuff) and 2) its predictable result (forgetting my X because it's living in the wrong box, taking twice as long to pack because my belongings have to be reassembled from their component bits, having two of everything because it just happened to make sense at the time - and yet never having anything because it's too hard to get to).
As I mentioned, change is inevitable and while I may have been compartmentalized in the past, my life is moving more in the direction where stuff is starting to blend, and a significant place this is happening is in the area of "survival" tools - not so much in the case of surviving an apocalypse but more in the case of "I need a bungie to tie down a box" - where more and more of my life demands that I have a knife (for example) or a screwdriver (very much more likely) and with the addition of saddlebags to my motorcycle, it has finally come to this: a specific subset of tools which are used in camping/hiking/backpacking are also needed for work and the motorcycle, at which point I may as well start carrying them everywhere.
Which means that in addition to doing the keys/wallet/phone/building pass patdown every morning, I have a bag of tools to keep track of. So what is the smallest bag of tools I can get away with? Let the guessing game begin.