Some Thoughts on the Twelve Boxes

The great 11 box purge turned into a 12 box purge, because there was a box hidden down behind the others. In the previous entry I detailed the contents of the boxes and their disposition. To make a long story short – five boxes gone, five boxes of books kept, and two boxes of personal mementos. All in all it was a very successful purge night!

I got home from work yesterday, had a quick dinner of sushi (golden California rolls and Philadelphia rolls from Totoro Sushi Boat on Saratoga Avenue. http://www.yelp.com/biz/totoro-sushi-boat-san-jose

Then, I fired up the last two episodes of Mildred Pierce on HBO and dove into the purging of boxes. (If you didn’t watch it, Mildred Pierce on HBO was excellent.) I’ve often noticed that when I am purging “stuff” I often need to make a run at it, sort of a series of false starts before suddenly I dive in and start purging.

The vast majority of stuff that ended up destined for the shredder or the trash can last night was notes, notebooks, and personal papers – old records, old letters, etc. A lot of it was old work product or old school product that I probably hung onto at some time, for some reason, and that reason has long since escaped. I ended up with about half a box full of personal papers that I am keeping. These tended to be things that were either interesting to me, or related to my personal history.

Since they’ve been winnowed down to about half a box, they are a very minimal set of documented mementos and I am tempted to scan a good number of them in, and then purge them as well. I would like to organize the ones relating to my personal history into an album, so I can flip through it and reminisce, sort of like a photo album.

There is one remaining task, which is to shred the documents that contain person information, which I will probably do tonight – it won’t take too long.

I wound down the evening with T.R., who has been such a great inspiration for simplification, and then attempted to go to sleep.

I say attempted because my brain was in a complete whirl for about an hour or two after I laid down. I really didn’t fall asleep until about midnight, after several fits and starts. There wasn’t anything specific whirling about, I think it was just a general purpose whirl because in reviewing the records and documents there were a lot of old ones, ones that touched some very old places in my memory – it didn’t particularly call up any specific memory, but it swirling the whole pond around.

I had been blocked up against those boxes for quite a while and it is a very good feeling to have made it past them! On with further simplification.