At the Little Middle School, we have too many books for the shelves.

This is not a problem I used to see clearly. I just figured that we needed more shelves.

That is, until I encountered the work of Dana K. White, a self-professed “deslobification” expert out of Texas who proposes a simple idea she calls The Container Concept: shelves, boxes, bins, closets, and even homes are containers, meant to contain, or limit, the number of items that can be there.

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When I bought sheets to outfit our tiny apartment, I just knew that they had to be 100% cotton.

I’m a snob when it comes to sheets, and a cotton/poly blend wasn’t going to do it for me. Maybe I’m too sensitive, like the princess of "The Princess and the Pea,” but cotton/poly blend sheets makes me feel like I’m sleeping in a plastic bag. So I walked down the aisle of the local Wal-Mart until I found a few 100% cotton sheet sets and picked one.

But over the next few months, I felt that something was off. These sheets just felt so flimsy. They were so soft that they always felt dirty, even when they were perfectly clean. I realized that even though the softness of sheets is often a selling point, I didn’t like soft sheets. I longed for the thick, cool, crisp sheets I had had has a child. Where were those?

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My husband and I just moved into a new house. Actually, it’s a very old house, built in 1880.

Accordingly, it’s small by modern standards, just under 900 square feet. But it doesn’t feel small. It feels just right.

I’ve lived in places that felt too small. And the logical solution was to move somewhere bigger. But what I now see, after spending some time living miserably in an enormous house, is that bigger isn’t necessarily better. It is more useful to identify and address specific challenges.

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When faced with an overwhelming mess — I have one in my living room right now, the result of literally emptying the contents of a pickup truck, including a table saw, onto the floor — it is sometimes reasonable to take drastic measures. Let’s shove it all into a closet or call the junk people to haul it all away.

And when the mess is more of an intangible one — a broken process, a difficult relationship, a cluttered schedule — we likewise might seek ways to metaphorically shove it in a closet or send it to the dump.

But sometimes, the elements are too valuable to discard. We must salvage what we can. In these cases, we have to use a more deliberate process. At the very moment when we most want to rush and just be done with the whole thing, we have to slow down and be present. When we do, we might discover a much more satisfying experience and outcome.

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In Laurel Snyder’s Orphan Island, ostensibly a middle grades novel but filled with allegory that would go right over the head of the average ten-year-old, nine children live together peacefully on an island. Every year, a mysterious boat arrives with a young child and takes away the eldest child. The new eldest child must teach the new youngest child the ways of the island, rules that have been handed down from child to child for as long as anyone can remember.

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