On Culling My Books 📚

If there are too many books to arrange on the floor all at one time, I ask my clients to divide them into four broad categories: General (books you read for pleasure) Practical (references, cookbooks, etc.) Visual (photograph collections, etc.) Magazines Once you have piled your books, take them in your hand one by one and decide whether you want t

This is another thing that makes letting go difficult. The things in our life—people, places, experiences, dreams—all rest on each other, like blocks in a building. Some are more important than others, some are less so. Some of them are integral. Some are the foundation. But move enough blocks, even the secondary ones, and everything starts to crum

I’d downsized substantially before moving to Paris years earlier, spending months getting rid of almost everything I owned before I left, arriving with just a few suitcases. I vowed not to amass so much stuff ever again and not cram my small apartment with clothes, kitchenware, and cookbooks, and would only have the essentials in my new, simplified

In other words, we often discover, and even rediscover, ourselves in what we keep around us. But that codependence or co-evolution of collection and person wouldn’t happen if the order of Benjamin’s shelves and the catalog of his books kept changing every few months.

plan for getting rid of our physical belongings; it was also a plan for achieving mental clarity. In creating a personal life that was bare of all but the essentials, parallels to my work started to become evident — what was truly necessary and what wasn’t. By

Accessibility  — Ownership often sucks. You have to keep your things tidy, up-to-date, and in the case of digital material, backed up. And in this mobile world, you have to carry it along with you. Many people, me included, will be happy to have others tend our “possessions” by subscribing to them. We’ll pay Acme Digital Warehouse to serve us

‘Am I having trouble getting rid of this because of an attachment to the past or because of fear for the future?’