This weekend we had a big neighborhood wide garage sale, and my wife decided to really get serious about it as an opportunity to get rid of some of the old stuff floating around our house. We were successful on that count, we were able to get something cleared out. But as always with such ventures, getting to that point means filtering through your possessions and deciding which just don’t carry the usefulness or attachment they once did. The latter is of course the more difficult and books, at least in our home, carry some of the strongest ties to the heart, my son has an entire bookshelf of various, mostly science oriented books, with an entire shelf set aside for his favorite series books, the eleven from “the Diary of a Whimpy Kid”. It was interesting to watch him go through them, and you could see the looks on his face as he read the covers and made his decisions. He was generally ruthless, though on occasion he would pick up something and say “I feel like we should keep this” or something similar, and place it carefully back on his shelf. I couldn’t help but feel there was a small bit of growing up hidden in this event, as he let go of a few of the acquisitions of a child, making space for the acquisitions (or austerity) of a young man.
Cogito, ergo, zoom 