I don’t think I am a pack rat, right. But from a closer look at my office, I just might be.  On the surface, it is amazingly neat with lots of personality. From a swanky light on the wall, a globe that turns by sunlight or any kind of light, a gorgeous chair and desk, and a plethora of books relatively neatly packed in a custom-made bookcase, it is all here.

So, what is the problem? Books galore and notebooks and all the rest, so much stuff that I had a pile of books on the floor near my bedside table, and a few others scattered about the house here and there.  When Paul suggested that I give some of them to charity to avoid putting them back on our clean carpet, I went into a melt down and exclaimed quite loudly that he was out of order. Really, was a pile of books bothering him that much?

He looked at me rather quizzically and backed off.  I had won so I thought until about thirty minutes later when my conscience taunted me.

Fine I thought, I will find a small bookcase, a job that proved to be impossible. Though our bedroom is quite big, our house, a modern London townhouse, has minimal wall space and storage space for that matter.

Still, I persevered hoping to find a suitable piece of furniture to stick in the one empty corner of our bedroom. Delighted, Paul happily measured the space and reviewed all my selections. Alas, nothing worked.  Too tall, too dark, too handsome. You get the picture.

Back to the drawing board I went but this time to my office and sat in the middle of the floor, looking for space and then it dawned on me that I had a cabinet full of used notebooks, 23 to be exact, most of them Moleskin, and all sorts of old devices–an iPhone 5, two Blackberry’s, a Nokia phone, an iPad, a Kindle.  I could go on, but I won’t.

Furthermore, I noticed the open shelf beside the cabinet, crammed with all the UIO podcast scripts and mounds of papers from my parents’ estate (if you will), not to mention the rammed packed cupboard on the other side of the room, a part of the bookcase.  In there, I found two old manuscripts, and God knows what else.

Facing unrest from my subconscious, I was relieved when my rational mind reminded me what was at stake. Not only were most of the books good reads and some were my own and the works of friends and other cherished authors, but also the papers and notebooks were packed with memories, and the manuscripts were valuable, too, if only to me.

It prodded me to come up with a plan that would save the books, the memories and manuscripts and find a final resting place, if you will, for the items I needed to let go.

First, I gathered the notebooks and saw that more than half of them could be discarded, and the rest, still had a few empty pages to be filled. So back in the cupboard they went.

With the discards, I learned that Moleskin covers are not recyclable and all anyone on the internet could think to do was remove the paper and recycle it, which is the last thing I was prepared to do, after reading pages of personal dreams, actual nightmares, arguments and discussions which took place over the years. I laughed, even cried and thanked God I had not put some of those words out into the world.

Without hesitation, I got shredding what I could not recycle and began the search for a new home for the Moleskin covers. So far, I have failed at the latter, so they are likely on their way to the tip. Don’t judge!

In the meantime, the other precious items such as my parent’s papers and my manuscripts have found a new home in a box underneath one of our storage beds, with the rest of the manuscripts, while the old devices have made their way back to their originators or a suitable recycling outlet.

As for the books, I kept them all, every one of them but they are in their own happy spaces now on shelves in my office.  The day will come when I must let some of them go but for now, I have had plenty of purging, letting go of the old and embracing the new.  I like the space! My conscience does too.