We're moving. From Colorado to Utah, not far in distance, but quite far in situation. The house we're going from is 2,400 square feet, and we're soon to live in just under 1,200 square feet. Half.
It's time to pare down. There's a whole genre out there for anti-clutterers, the “if-it-doesn't-spark-jo”y Mari Kondo method to the Swedish Death Cleaning way.
I'm not into any one process, but I belive whole-heartedly in all of them. I recently stood in front of some framed diplomas. I held one up and thought hard about it. I hadn't put it up on the wall in some time. And it was just collecting dust. So why do I keep it? Why keep something that I know, for certain, when I die, will leave an artifact for my kids to feel guilty about throwing away someday? (In the end, I decided that because that particular diploma has economic value, I'll keep it, but recognize it won’t go up on the wall, then take it out of the frame and put it in an artist’s portfolio in the closet.)
Notebooks. Old notebooks. I bet you're like me and you have a pile of old notebooks. Big ones and small ones, stickers on the cover and pieces of paper sticking out at all angles from previous notes and ideas.
I gathered up a pile of them, nearly one hundred in all, from the past two decades. I flipped through a few of them to catch the gist of what they had to tell me. And as I did I asked myself, when was the last time I looked at any of these?
The honest answer: not since the day I droppped them in the bin for storage.
So why hold onto them? I think, for me, psychologically, it's a safety blanket, the hope that someday I may reach into one of them and pull out the fragment of an idea, jotted down a decade ago, that'll be worth millions tomorrow.
It's also to recognize the work it takes to build a bin of ideas. I held on to those ideas over time, and somehow, darn it, I want the value I poured onto those pages to be worth something more than just my time and effort.
But the reality is I haven't yet made my millions from an old notebook. And keeping some scrap of paper doesn't make my work valuable, when I know full well that the value I derived from those books was the thinking that went into them, not necessarily the physical paper itself.
So when it came time to move, I pitched them. Without hesitation, without remorse. Gone. Into another kind of bin, the recycle bin.
Everyone needs to make their own decision on their own way. For me, I think the decision to downsize, to get rid of old ideas on paper is to demonstrate the confidence that you'll simply make new ones, and that the old ones never really die, they're still up in that brain of yours, awaiting the next time you can call them forward for their next use.