Summary: Your life is a constant and evolving story of emotional responses to uncontrollable circumstances. And so is your book collection. Intentional or unintentional, large or small, book collections tend to form chaotically and impulsively through a haphazard combination of random purchases either designed to satisfy current intellectual or emotional voids or simply to satisfy curiosity following a respected recommendation and/or well placed news or media plug.
Consider how simple decisions that we might consider trivial, such as what books to keep and which to let circulate, have certain and unpredictable impacts on our overall state of being.
In essence I’ll be figuring out how predictable emotional reactions to certain and specific things create our consistent, life defining attitudes.
To do so, we could begin by considering your emotional attachments to the crazy people in your life or by discussing your fervent desire to hang onto that one thing from that one time 25 years ago, but let’s start instead with a more trivial consideration: Clutter.
What is it? Well, according to Merriam Webster, “clutter” is “a confusing or disorderly state or collection.”
How does it happen? The key is in the words “confusing or disorderly.” And for that we add trivial. When things aren’t pressing, important, or obvious they have a tendency to collect in loose and disorganized patterns. So let’s look at a trivial collection. The most random and trivial thing I can think of at the moment is a collection of books.
So where do all these book purchases go? Consider your book collection.
Assuming you’re a normal consumer of written material, your collection is probably much like mine in that it’s an interesting mish-mash of randomly, yet somehow intentionally selected materials that at first glance seem to have no pattern, rhyme or reason for existing in a group. Hence the above definition we’re using for clutter: a confusing or disorderly state or collection. And from practical experience most people would agree that clutter by nature is chaotic.
So why then do we step over the clutter and chaos created by hanging onto it as if it served a meaningful purpose?
The simple answer is that we become emotionally attached to things that produce a strong emotional response in us. We have a difficult time separating ourselves physically from the thing producing the emotional response. Again, considering books, we read the book and then in nearly all cases shelve it and never again open its pages other than specific reference materials such as text books, legal references, accounting tables, and other manuals, which we may return to when a specific situation requires.
Keep in mind here that these books rarely create an emotional response when reading and keeping these books around may serve a specific purpose as a reference in the case that you need to recall specific details regarding information that is difficult to remember.
So why do we hang onto books? Emotional attachment. There are many valid and logical explanations that sound better than simply emotional attachment, but the reality of the situation is that we really don’t have sound reasons for hanging on to books.
They take up space in our lives, creating clutter and reducing space for the addition of new, more useful things. I’m not saying that books are useless; I’m merely suggesting that their content remains in our live regardless of the physical presence of the book itself. Emotional responses to well written content produce strong memories that can be recalled whenever necessary.
Therefore there is rarely a need to re-read the book. Case in point, the average reader rarely if ever re-reads a book, especially non-fiction. Book collections become clutter, which then in turn, generally creates chaos.
My suggestion is that if you have a collection of books that you rarely, if ever, reference or re-read, then you should seriously consider getting rid of them. Downsizing your collection to materials that you regularly read will serve to reduce the clutter and chaos in your life. By donating your books, others can benefit from their contents and you will be “paying it forward” which, in our current world, is always a good thing.