With hoarding there are extremes upon the spectrum. I wouldn't say that I am the worst kind of hoarder - like the Scottish fellow in the picture - but I admit that I display some elements of this behaviour.
I hang on to things and I struggle to let them go. I still have every university coursework essay that I submitted for assessment between September 1973 and December 1977 and I still have every Hull City football programme that I bought between November 1964 and May 2024 - sixty years worth.
But I am even worse with books. I have hundreds of them. Mostly I have read them just the once and have no plans to ever read them again. In May of last year, I rediscovered a large cache of books up in our attic and I was quite ruthless with them, managing to push nearly all of them into a book bank at one of this city's recycling centres. I know it was the right thing to do but I still kind of regret it. See related blogpost.
There's a bookcase in our bedroom and two downstairs in this study. Each shelf is packed to bursting point with books that will never be read again. However, on Monday of this week, I was quite proud of myself for I took a bag of books to the new charity shop that has opened just down the main road. There were, I think, ten books in all and today I noticed that they are on sale for £2 each. Showing great mental fortitude, I did not buy them back. I let them go.
Some people are minimalists, living in uncluttered spaces. I guess the rest of us are meant to emulate them as if minimalism represented a cleaner, more holy approach to home life. But I am not sure about that. The psychology of hoarding is very interesting. Why do we do it? What, if anything, are we really trying to hang on to?
Perhaps my reluctance to part with books concerns the personal, mental connection I had with them when I read them. Ditching them would arguably be like dumping evidence of my intellectual and emotional relationship with the world beyond these four walls.
Where are you on the hoarding/minimalism spectrum?
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/0AvOfqR