Shea and I got around to a *long* overdue task of decluttering our garage this weekend.
Strangely, it reminded me of when I was in my first librarian job and (purposely?) my boss assigned me a major weeding project. They just kept bringing me packed cart after overloaded cart of books and I had to go through and manually review each one for all the usual (condition, age, circs) plus we had a system at the time where I also had to check a database to see if it was the last copy in the province and if so, send it to our Provincial Library to be archived.
Not all but many librarians tend to be hoarders by nature and I think we also tend to be pretty precious about books so that’s why I suspect that this was a purposeful assignment to try to “break” me of either of those characteristics early in my career.
As we decluttered, I kept thinking back to those lessons – how I had to not be sentimental about the books in front of me (especially ones I’d read or authors I liked or whatever) and how I had to think about the implications of the stuff I was getting rid of and the same applied to our accumulated “stuff” over the past two decades.
In fact, nothing captured this balance better than the bin pictured above – a tub of stuff we’d had since we got married fifteen years and which had even moved to and from Calgary once – a bin originally labeled “Wedding Gifts” which held all the various towels and kitchen items and various other dust collectors we’d received but never used, with those words now crossed out and replaced by the words “Garage Sale”.
It was a long tough day as we threw a ton of stuff into a dumpster, created a large “donate” pile (that we still have to deal with) and, since we still had some room in the dumpster, we even did a weeding of our books and threw out some of the ones that likely wouldn’t find a home anywhere else – twenty year old nursing textbooks, well-worn paperbacks and all sorts of other outdated books (although that 2006 Consumer Reports Guide might be a collectible by now!)
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