The endless winnowing

Need more stuff? (Image by TheUjulala)

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.

You don’t need to figure out which items “spark joy” a la Marie Kondo. You don’t have to rid yourself of some emotional attachment to the past that is the root cause of your physical ailments, like the woo-woo folks would have you think.

You can keep whatever you want, as long as it fits on the dang shelves.

So that is the next undertaking for us. It’s easy to constantly collect things; it’s comforting to keep things that could be useful “for someday”; it takes intention and intense decision-making to get rid of things. It doesn’t just happen.

And the process is still emotional, even if you’re simply acknowledging the fact that you prefer this book to that one. It does represent a road not taken, an alternative path in which you developed a slightly different set of preferences and practices. I can still get awfully caught up in questions of identity when it comes to dealing with stuff.

I have had moments of clarity with respect to this challenge, though. A couple of years ago, I went through a rough time in my life and sought a solitary crafting hobby to soothe me. I tried cross stitch, sewing, and knitting. After giving each one a sincere try, knitting was the clear winner. So I gifted all of my sewing gear to a friend and never looked back. (The cross stitchers in my life refused to add to their overwhelming collections of hoops, fabric, and embroidery floss.) It felt really good to have such a strong sense of what I wanted and what I didn’t.

What stops me from doing that with books? Well, our school seeks to meet individual needs — and now, we’ve added an online school that delivers a fully customized program. How do we know that the math curriculum we bought and never used wouldn’t be perfect for someone? And what if this popular vocabulary program didn’t work for us because we were just doing it wrong?

In order to let go of the books, I have to let go of the idea that there is some right way to do it and some ideal, unchanging future program that we will stick with forever once we figure it out. There is a constant flow, there is constant change — and books will be forever added to our shelves. And if the shelves are full, I’ve got to get rid of some stuff in order to make room.

Maybe we’ll give away a bunch of books only to find that those are the exact ones we needed. But that wouldn’t be so bad. At least we would know exactly what we needed! And maybe things will grow — maybe we’ll require more space and more shelves at some point.

But those are all decisions to make later on. The decisions to make today have only to do with the space that we have right now, which was vacated on March 13 and now sits empty and virtually untouched, an Akrotiri with no volcano. Now that we’re bringing students back — outside as of now, but hopefully inside before too long — we can’t hang on to the past and how we hoped things would be. We can’t even think about what we’re going to need and how we want things to be in the future. We have to make things work for the present moment.

The decision-making will never be over. We’ll be constantly making adjustments: acquiring, winnowing, shifting. If this year has taught us anything, it’s that we can’t possibly predict what’s going to happen or prepare for every contingency. And yet, when it comes down to it, we will find a way to make things work with what we have or get the resources we need. We’re going to be okay, no matter what we decide to keep or toss.