Sorting paper....

To prepare for our move to New Mexico, I've been going through our old files to see what can be safely shredded and thrown away. (Answer: almost all of it.)

It is an exhausting process, but also humbling. Your triumphs you keep in full view. Your failures you quietly entomb in dead storage. Thus, while sorting through the check registers and credit card carbons (remember them?) from the middle 80s, I also find myself re-examining thirty years of rejected book proposals, unfinished business plans, notebooks filled with ideas that—in retrospect—seem at best laughable…

The good news is that I will rid my life of all this detritus. It is a kind of purge. I will haul box upon box of things that-just-didn't-work-out to the dump. They'll be pulped and recycled and made into new paper. Literally carte blanche.

And I will find myself somehow lighter. Somehow unburdened.