Yesterday, and today, I tried to KonMari my books. It was both phyisically exausting, moving all that paper pulp around, and mentally exausting, as I have an undue fondness for books, so letting go of them, even books I will likely never read, is like waxing chest hairs. Maybe some people have wimpy and easy to excorscise chest hairs, but I have manly, Russain bear-man chest hair, and waxing that would be liable to simply skin me down the front. But it's not quite as serious as pulling teeth. Or maybe I just don't like cliched phrases. Also, I made the dire mistake of skimming through some of the books. Occasionally, this is fine. Usually, it's not that much time. But it adds up, and every now and then a book sucks me in and I loose my momentum and objectivity and have to reset, which takes time and energy.
This kind of purging is not something I can just relax while doing at the end of the day. It pulls at my fears, my attachments: well sure, I've never read it in the year or two or three I've had it, but what if I want it down the line? And it has so much good info in it! And it's about my favorit saint! No matter that I haven't looked at it ever and the only reason I would do so in the forseeable future would be to justify not throwing it out/giving it away. Or that I have several redundant sets of most of that information, in various configurations. There is a part of my brain, perhaps a part shared with pack rats and chipmunks, that needs to hoard precious things. The more precious, the more intense is the need.
I carried a half-eaten bag of rice with me, that wasn't even mine, from one apartment to the next, just because I didn't want it to go to waste. I didn't even like the rice, as it was old and non-organic. It took me... a year and a half, to discard a free, half-eaten bag of poor quality rice. I made some rice pudding with it, but there was just too much. And part of me didn't want to use potentialy arsinic-sprayed ingrediants. So imagine the dire, brainstem urgest I must quell to let go of a good book that I just really am never going to use.
Knowledge is precious to me. I used to have a belife that if I just owned the knowledge I wanted to aquire, it would somehow magically make me read it and then implement it. But this is not so. In fact, it seems like the opposite is true, if I have something that I was already ambivilant about reading/doing, then having it seems to release some of the pressure to do something about that urge to, say, learn Russian, or learn to draw. I do much better if I make myself struggle a bit, make do with what I have, and then, once it get's just too irritating to deal with as I constantly have to contend with sub-par tools or lack of technique, then I get the whatever it is. More often, I simply don't do the thing in the first place, and then I'm glad I didn't get whatever book or tool or what-have you.
I've also found that having lots of information decreases the power of all of the information. Determining the importaint one for any task is effortful, so more often, I'll just settle for the first one that comes to hand. And there is kind of a limited amount of stuff that I can be acutly aware of. If I have one bookshelf of super high quality books, I can glance at it often, and quickly pick out one that is appropriate for my need, or be reminded of one that I want to read or re-read. But if I have a while bookshelf full, I kind of go numb to all of them. The good one's get lost in the shuffle, and the whole thing becomes a piece of furnature rather than a series of tools.
I guess the bottom line is, I have a very limited amount of time. That limits the amount of attention I can pay to anything. It limites the amount of time I can spend reading. Time becomes super valuble, when you really stop to think about it. Why in the world would you waste your time reading or doing something that was only ok? Except that's exactly what I'm thinking, as I keep all these "ok" books. I'm thinking, some day I'll have time, and then I'll get to them, and then I'll read them and have in my brain and level up. Except it doesn't work that way. the new information pushes out old information and the actual development of skill is less about trying on new skills every week and more about sticking with a few good one's until they become great.
This is what has been branded into my brain recently as I think about simplifying my life and removing clutter. Life is bounded and limited sevearly by time. Time is precious, non-renewable, inflexible. You cannot get more time by managing it. You can only use what you have better. And to do that, one of the main things you need to do is very simple: stop doing the things that don't matter. Stop doing the things that kind of matter, stop doing the things that definitly matter, and focuse as exclusivly as you can on doing the things that are wildly importaint. There will be some things that you have to do for phyisical upkeep, that really do not seem wildly importaint. Laundry comes to mind. But you can't go starving nakid and unwashed for very long before it starts to get pretty importaint, so I guess we should figure out a way to do the seemingly unimportaint things, in a way befitting the precious rescource they are using.
For me that means trying to turn every activity into a form of spiritual practice or devotion.
I feel like this is a quote from a poetry collection or something: "After enlightenment: the dishes."
A MORNING PRAYER WRITTEN BY ST. THERESE
(this went along with the above image I found)
O my God! I offer Thee all my actions of this day for the intentions and for the glory of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I desire to sanctify every beat of my heart, my every thought, my simplest works, by uniting them to Its infinite merits; and I wish to make reparation for my sins by casting them into the furnace of Its Merciful Love.
O my God! I ask of Thee for myself and for those whom I hold dear, the grace to fulfill perfectly Thy Holy Will, to accept for love of Thee the joys and sorrows of this passing life, so that we may one day be united together in heaven for all Eternity.
Amen.
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Oh, here's the name of that poetry collection: "After the Ecstasy, the Laundry" I have some qualms with the writer's assertion that he is enlightened (I could do a whoooole blog post on that one. Not the first guy like that I've run into. He's had a profound spiritual experience, likely permanently life-changing, but he is to enlightenment as a zygote is to a full-grown adult. Except the zygote doesn't claim it's a full grown adult and stop growing, whereas these jokers tend to do just that.)
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