I've been in a Marie Kondo mood recently, thinking about getting rid of stuff. Kondo's 2014 book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up came to mind. Given the accumulation of stuff can get out of control because we can't decide whether something goes into the SAVE pile or the DISCARD/DONATE pile. Our dithering indecision takes us nowhere.
Kondo has a simple rule starting out: Does this give me joy? If not, it's not a keeper. We can have joy, of course, for various reasons. As one example, I have joy for a 282-page textbook Felter's Arithmetical Analysis: Intermediate, published in 1866 by Charles Scribner & Company of Cleveland, Ohio. I’ll never work through this math book from a century and a half ago. No, my joy in this antique volume is--in his own words--exactly the same textbook my great-grandfather studied in 1868 in St. Louis. This keeper reaches across generations and reminds me of my origins.
A book I didn't keep, though it gave me great joy, was Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, the Farrar, Giroux, Straus first printing from 1968, signed by the author. Wolfe's book is so much an Oregon story about Ken Kesey & cohorts, I was surprised the rare book room at Multnomah County Library lacked a copy. I knew donation would give it a home that would outlive me (important). Plus I’d share with others who might visit the John Wilson Special Collections at Central Library and peruse this in-library use only volume, complete with the original dust jacket designed by the iconic artist Peter Max & his color-filled 60s vibe.
But a book that doesn't give me any special joy, and qualifying for the DISCARD pile, would have to be Intel MC-960 System Debug Monitor User Guide, a software manual I updated, working on contract for Intel. Ultra technical discussions of an avionics chip (processor architecture and instruction sets) and how it interfaced with Intel’s software tool to help programmers test software. Honestly, I picked up this manual six months after I finished my work on the project and read a section and didn't comprehend it was something I had written. And the software tool was never released. I've no regrets about leaving technical writing, given what I wrote aged almost quarterly.
These are only three examples of my Kondo-izing in action, taken from my book collection. I have many other sorts of possessions and certainly could have used Kondo's wisdom in the past. Once I got it in my head to toss all my LP records in one go. Looking at LP’s comeback today, Ouch!
Image credit: abebooks.co.uk
Read Charlie Dickinson's story collection The Cat at Light's End, as an ebook in these downloadable formats:
.mobi (Kindle)
.epub (most other readers)
.pdf (for PCs)
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