I’m no stranger to change, I’ve had to say goodbye to a great many things and very many people during my lifetime, for a range of different reasons.
Some of those goodbyes were an easy choice to make and an easy action to take, others not so much. There have been gut-wrenching moments where I’ve had to let go, usually those ones were marked by BIG decision times, you know…those punctuations in life where you take a leap, a big leap, a good leap, but that good leap comes with a side of trade-off. That trade-off is a goodbye.
I’m not a stuff-for-the-sake-of-it person, I’m not a consumer in that way. I surround myself with beautiful things that make me happy but I guess I’m more of a minimalist, I want my things to ‘spark joy’ as Marie Kondo would say. And if I don’t love them, if they don’t ‘spark joy’ then I don’t want them in my life.
And then there are books…
Why is it so hard for me to let go of old books? I’m not a reader of fiction so the books I do have, the books on my bookshelf have all taught me something, the subjects are varied and I still consider the subject matter to be close to my heart, something I believe in even if the passion for some of that subject matter has faded over the years.
Even so, the selection of books I’ve chosen to keep over the years represent some of the most significant stages of my life, going all the way back to my early teenage years when I immersed myself totally in my passion, herbalism and metaphysics. I read everything I could get my hands to increase my knowledge around those topics. Still passionate to this day I might add but it’s not my herbal books I am parting ways with.
The genres cover a broad spectrum and if I had room I probably wouldn’t be culling but I don’t have space for a giant library, or even just a regular sized one really and my collection of books takes up a decent amount of space, which is what has brought me to this point.
So it’s time for me to downsize my book collection, many of those books I’ve been carrying around with me for decades, some of them I haven’t even picked up in at least one decade, quite of few of them much longer than that.
So it’s time…
And it’s not been an easy task.
Emotional attachment
Not just because I’ve had these books for so long, although that is probably reason enough to feel so emotional about the letting go. And not just because I have books that belonged to my mother, that in itself creating an emotional attachment, even though it’s been over twenty years since she passed and their subject matter is not for me.
For other reasons as well…
The beautifully tactile experience of reading text printed on paper, or written on paper, cannot be replicated digitally. Having said that I do read many books via a digital medium as well, it seems to depend on the genre for me, not a problem though, the world is big enough to accommodate both forms of medium.
I’m also an environmentalist, I don’t like to waste things, I like to reuse and repurpose as much as possible. I have a great deal of respect for the fact that these books are made from paper, quality paper from actual trees, and I’m very connected to trees, to nature, to the plant world in particular.
I’ve sorted through the ‘keeping’ and ‘not keeping’ and have my piles of those that are moving on, organised and on the floor ready to move them on and yes, I’ve shed a few tears in the process…
But yes it’s time…time to say goodbye to some of my old friends in order to open a new chapter, and the letting go really does feel like a new chapter.