The fatal flaw in my approach to ‘tidying up’ is the inability to throw things out.
I hasten to add that I am not suffering from Diogenes Syndrome: rubbish I can throw out, that is not a problem. The problem is defining what rubbish actually is.
I am typing this bathed in perspiration (horses sweat, men perspire, women glow) after attempting to clear a passage from the door to the end of the first row of bookcases, in what I euphemistically refer to as my library.
Even I (!) am prepared to admit that I have too many books.
I should rapidly qualify that statement. It is not something that I actually believe. The truth is that I do not have sufficient shelf space for the books that I have, and there is no more room into which bookcases can expand. Some shelves are double stacked – and in one case triple stacked. And they are not truly sorted, so trying to find something I know that I possess is sometimes more an act of faith than logic.
I keep telling myself that I delight in the serendipitous discovery of long neglected tomes, as I did when recently searching for ‘the other cache’ of Huxley novels that I knew that I owned. It was an interesting and revealing process, but I would have preferred to have been able to put my hands on them immediately. The situation was not tenable; Something Would Have to be Done.
Let me say, straight away, that something was done. I can now walk down almost the full length of the first aisle, but the second is blocked because, although I have technically ‘tidied up’, what I have actually done is move things about a bit. As some of that movement involved pieces of winter clothing there is a buffer time zone of a few months before I have to start wearing long sleeves and move the stuff again so that it can be used.
The temperature on the third floor in my ‘office’ is 32C and that is with two fans running full-time full-power. The temperature in the ‘library’ would have given the Black Hole of Calcutta run for its money! (Does that reference mean anything to anyone nowadays? And isn’t Kolkata the modern preferred spelling?) Anyway, it was hot, and what with my knees etc. there was only so much time I could allocate to tidying; more self defence than self-presentation!
But, it is a start, and as part of the Family Wisdom states, “Anything is Better Than Nothing!”
What the walkable vista has opened up is the amazingly cluttered nature of the shelves themselves. They hold books of course, it is after all a library, but there is a bewilderingly various assortment of gadgets (and parts thereof), papers, pictures, folders, tools, clothing, leads, plugs and things that usually live in ‘that’ drawer in the kitchen because even though one does not know their functions, they look too serious and ‘useful’ to throw out.
So my tidying is but a partial Level 1 clearance, allowing me access to Level 2, which will lead to Level 3 – and beyond. At which point I will have lost the will to live, though I might (if I had any enthusiasm left) be able to find the books that I am now too tired to imagine, let alone look for.
And the true horror, for me, is that tidying the Library is but a precursor to tidying The Third Floor and bringing order to my office and creating a space on my desk larger than a medium sized dinner plate for me to work!
It is always good to have a goal in life. No matter how unreachable it might be!
