Old phrases renewed

A quotation came back to me yesterday afternoon. It has religious connotations, but also humanist ones. What can I say, I grew up Catholic. A quick search for attributions suggested "Anonymous."

“If, as Herod, we fill our lives with things, and again with things; if we consider ourselves so unimportant that we must fill every moment of our lives with action, when will we have time to make the long slow journey across the desert as did the magi? Or sit and watch the stars as did the shepherds? Or brood over the coming of the child as did Mary? For each one of us there is a desert to travel, a star to discover, and a being within ourselves to bring to life.”

Your stuff owns you as much as you own your stuff

The other day, a friend posted a link to a LifeHacker guide on how to let go of sentimental stuff, which is one of the layers of stuff I need to deal with. Well, that, and all of the academic papers.

I'm going to tell you a story about academic papers, and then come back to the stuff-matter.

When I started as a workstudy student in the Psychology Department at Tufts, I had two main jobs. One job was to keep the secretary company. The second job was to enter journal articles into a computer database for one of the professors in the department (my future undergrad advisor, as it turned out). After I or another student finished entering in a stack of journal articles, we would trudge down Boston Avenue to Bacon Hall to file away the articles in this professor's filing cabinets. That part of the project was a nightmare. The bank of 8 3-drawer filing cabinets was so full that it was almost physically impossible to shove more paper in the drawers. My fingertips would hurt after afternoons of trying to squeeze in more papers. We used to joke that one day, we'd come in to Bacon and we'd just see an explosion of papers coming forth from K's office.

Also, many of the articles we set out to enter into the database were duplicates anyway. But it was a job that paid money, so I did the job.

Anyway, back to the layers of stuff, including my own collection of journal articles. I think I've said this before, but it seems to me that a lot of the websites focused on helping people downsize help with a lot of the mechanics of downsizing, but without necessarily addressing all of the whys of downsizing. Probably because the whys are multifaceted. For me, the downsizing continues to come from a desire to be intentional. In the kitchen, I want to be able to cook and eat food, without getting too caught up in dealing with food waste or the mental overhead of dealing with the remainders of that collection of exotic ingredients (used the last of the rosewater today). With respect to projects, I want to be channeled and focused on creative projects so that I bring things to completion that I am happy with. I also want to give myself time to read books, and write letters, and think.

I might not wind up having a whole lot of time for a whole lot of the above in the upcoming months, because of two other large priorities: preparing myself to ride in the Paris-Brest-Paris again (going to be very hard both physically and emotionally), and my work life. It actually feels good to have research feel this all-consuming, a sensation that was rare in Texas. It's probably because of the rate at which I am learning new things here. I still also need to keep working on the more difficult aspects of work, however, such as the next leafcutter manuscript (which I think will be good and impactful work), analyzing and writing about the cricket research, and thinking ahead to the upcoming projects for my next postdoc adventure (details on that still forthcoming).