This week my wife and I were cleaning out our barn loft, closets and crawlspace. We have lived in our house for 10 years now and it was deemed to be necessary to clean it out and get rid of anything that, as Marie Kondo says, doesn't give us pleasure. In doing this, I finally went through stuff that I had had for 40 plus years. I had letters from old girlfriends and what made me laugh was that I usually got all of these letters but I never really wrote to them. I didn't believe that I had the talent for writing back then. I had no idea what I was failing to do by not writing to them. Anyway, I finally threw all of that stuff out. However, I didn't do it without going through it all. After high school and some point after I had decided to quit college, I had decided that I wanted to be a writer and for one of the most obvious of reasons, not writing, I didn't become one but I had been given an article, that apparently I had kept and found during all of this. It was written by James J. Kilpatrick for his advice column in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and it was about writing.
The article itself is quite informative and good but for me it's that headline that speaks volumes to me. It is, in part, why I have chosen to also write this blog while working on writing bigger and better things. It is also why I have created a reading list of books to complete while doing this.
Understand I have enjoyed reading since, I was seven years old. I can remember reading everything from Encyclopedia Brown, to Danny Dun, to the Hardy Boys and Alfred Hitchcock & the Three investigators, on up to the Hobbit when I was in 4th grade. Since, my early college days, I've been reading Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Terry Goodkind, Stephen Coonts, Terry Brooks, and more. What I have never actually read, were the classics, like A Tale of Two Cities, Three Musketeers, Dracula, Frankenstein, and more. I never read the works of Twain, Lovecraft, Poe, Bradbury, Verne, Thoreau, or Emerson. I know there are many many more that I have not read. So that is why the list I have begun with reading Frankenstein.
Talk about a book being way different and better than the movie. Frankenstein does that. No matter what Frankenstein movie you bring up, it doesn't come close to the book. However, I will admit the Boris Karloff original is a great horror classic movie that stands on its own merit. All I am saying is that the story as written by Mary Shelley is really good and Hollywood has done everything it could to say, this is our version of the story.
Well now we have most of the decluttering done. There is just one more space to work on and I have new lights to hang in the barn but really we are done. The space we need to tackle is my daughter's room. We are putting all of her stuff and a few items of mine in storage but it will not take up anywhere near the space that we just cleaned.
In any case, I feel it is important to tell you how liberating it is to declutter. One other area that surprisingly got decluttered during all of this is my mind. Throwing out the stuff I did allowed me to remove the related stuff from my mind. In the theory of memories of Sherlock Holmes, this is important to allow other, more necessary, stuff to get in. I suggest that you all take the first opportunity to declutter. If you need help read Marie Kondo's 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing'.
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