Spring cleaning
When you have a change in priorities, your bookshelves will show it. Your movie list, your bedside reading books, even music. Now I have almost all meditation and yoga-appropriate music in my iPad or iPhone.
I used to buy a lot of magazines especially on business innovations and strategic management. Now I find food–related magazines more interesting and books about the near future or what is happening now: Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded, of course after O NE of the things we do when the “ber” months come in is to clean the house to make way for Christmas gifts, baskets and more stuff which will eventually fill the tables and every inch of available space, whether you like it or not.
So one lazy Sunday, I decided to rid my shelves of: Stuff that has changed meaning to you over the years and you can now dispose; stuff that you have literally covered with papers upon papers promising to clean up someday; stuff that have accumulated from past meetings, conferences , seminars which actually you have no use for except as scratch paper (using all clean paper backs for draft printing if you need to).
These were the things I found: a Card Scanner which I used to attach to an old laptop to file business cards of people I meet— well, today the App is available on iPhone to just scan the card using Cardcam or Scancard and you have them file immediately!
I found a video camera, yes with an SD card already. But I was laughing to see the SD memory card could only contain 1GB. Today’s cameras store 16GB or 32GB! And this was just a few years ago!
I remember having bought my FIRST digital camera with 32MB of storage, around seven photos. When I wanted to buy more memory cards that size, they did not have them in the market anymore. Ahhh, technology!
Then I fixed my bookshelves. After just four years, my book selection currently all centers on: Sustainability, Living Green, Green to Gold, and Social Responsibility books like Beyond Good Company, and Making the World Work Better. Even my food and recipe books have changed to Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, The Botany of Desire, and Bi-Rite’s Eat Good Food. reading his The World is Flat, which I read in 2005.
And then there is technology. When you do spring cleaning, you realize that technology is even faster than you think. You will get rid of cords and cables that connect to nothing or were supposed to connect two things you now do not remember. You will find empty boxes of what you meant to keep “just in case” you had to return what you bought because it did not work right. I even found a brand new printer cartridge for a printer I threw away last year and a printer plastic cover to boot!
Maybe it’s just me. I like to keep things because I will find time to read them, I will find time to fix them, I will find time to reread and appreciate them. Well, guess what? I found time to finally get them out of my life! It is very liberating to throw out things you really have not used since you kept them.
So, how about you? Have you done any spring cleaning in September? You will be surprised to find cards, notebooks, yet another dated diary with a 2011 calendar, and pens upons ballpens that do not write anymore, and more paper that others can use and you can give away.
It’s September and you have to make way for more stuff coming in this last quarter of the year. You will be surprised what you may find around you.