My Quantum Portal of a Closet

The day kept the promise of heat and tomorrow is going to keep the same promise. However, it was pretty nice.  It felt good to let that sun burn slowly into things, including me.  I got home from work about the usual time and settled in to watch the first episode of "The Game of Thrones", which was outstanding, and then put together a quick dinner. 

After dinner I seriously contemplating taking a nap, but decided against it.  With the heat, I was afraid it would become sleep and then I would be waking up at two a.m. and wondering why I couldn't sleep. 

So, I spent a good two hours of the evening cleaning and arranging things in the master bedroom closet.  I still have plenty of work to do in there, but I managed to get through the parts of it that were bothering me so that when I tackle the rest of it, I will be moving rather smoothly.

Typical of closets there is "stuff" in there that I  am not sure what it is or why I have it. I am, of course, completely convinced that all closets are quantum portals and stuff comes from the multiverse to land in my closet.  That is the only reasonable expectation I can come up with to account for the fact that I keep simplifying, and simplifying, and yet, again, simplifying.  But, at the end of the day, there is still "stuff" in the closet.

On Junk and Charitable Donations

I was re-reading the previous entry and realized I have asterisked a comment with the intention to add a footnote, then I forgot to add the footnote. I wanted to comment on the types of things that we donate to charity. Most charities will either turn around and sell the items (so they can apply the cash where they need to apply it) or allow people to take the donated items for free.

Having worked with charitable donations before one of the things I always recommend is the simple question “If the item was free, would you take it” and “how much would you pay for the item”. The reason I recommend this is charities often get a volume of stuff that they simply cannot move on – they can’t sell it and they can’t give it away. In those cases, where you don’t really see any value in the item, I would recommend you throw the item away, even though it may be in good shape – it may simply have no value. Often, when a charity receives donations, the first step of the donation process is sorting and evaluating the items – and sometimes they go straight from the donation bin to the dumpster.

The footnote I wanted to leave was simple – just use a little discretion and don’t use charities to get rid of your junk. If it is junk, just throw it away.

Daily Life: A Day of Small Things

I've been moving through a day of small things. Somewhere between last night and this morning, in my relatively small apartment, I misplaced the leather holder for my iPhone and my Bluetooth headset. I am sure where they are I set them down together and I am sure I had both of them when I came into the apartment last night. I am also sure that I will arrive home this evening and both of them, most likely, will be in plain sight and I will wonder how I managed to miss them this morning.

That got me to thinking about small things today and that thought stream was reinforced at work. I often spend a significant portion of my day in teleconferences. That is part of the life of a modern manager in a large company. When I am on teleconferences and they start to run long I will often walk over to the conference room and pace in circles. On a long teleconference I can easily walk a mile or more in repeated circles, first one direction and then the others. In the conference room there is a narrow place where the chairs around the table make for a narrow passage past a copier/printer.

Today, I stopped and pushed the conference table a few inches to one side, widening this little passage way to something that is comfortable to walk through without bumping into a chair on one side or the copier/printer on the other. That sort of crystallized my small things thought stream. As near as I could recall that was always a narrow passage area. Why didn't I slide the table over a few inches before? I've been in this work area going on two years now and I am pretty sure that passage has been narrow for the duration of that time. I am sure I've bumped into either the chair or the printer/copier a half a hundred times or more.

It just has me wondering how many other small things there are that I should do, that I need to do, that I would like to do - but just haven't done them because as single items they don't rise up high enough on the list of things that need to be done and they are definitely not on the list of things that I want to do. Maybe I should take and dedicate a day to wandering around my spaces and just - doing the small things that catch my eye.

I have flirted, at times, in my mind, with the idea of radical simplicity. Striping everything extraneous out, clearing my world of almost all of my "stuff". The challenge I have always run into is - I fight that urge within myself to store things for a rainy day. Never mind that when that rainy day comes, for the most part, it will not be stuff that I already have and instead be an excuse to get more stuff. Yes, I am dangerously close to channeling George Carlin there! Anyway, that is what I contemplating today as I move into the afternoon. I've finished my morning meetings. I've got the typical Monday correspondence and telephone calls cleaned up and I am ready to tackle the "to do" list. The sun has burned off the morning fog. I don't have anything planned for this evening, so I may take advantage of it and swing by the Laundromat to run a couple of loads of clothes through and get dinner at the deli down the street.