For most of my life, I collected books and articles, magazines and other sorts of
memorabilia. In these objects, I wanted to capture moments in time. I wanted to hold on to bits and pieces of significant events that were happening in the world as the history of the world and my own life swept forward into time.
I have stopped doing that. Partly, a reason for that is that I now longer have the space to keep even the things that I have acquired to date. But that does not tell the whole story. There is more to why I stopped collecting than that.
I used to feel the need to "understand" the things I read in the newspaper or on television. Awful and terrible things happened in the world every day. I could never fully understand how human beings could do such things to each other, without feeling remorse or regret. Wars. Persecution of those who are different. Indifference to the pain and suffering of others. Greed. Unbridled ambition. The abuse of children. Forcing children to become soldiers fighting for truly dubious causes. Blind hatred and prejudice. The list goes on but I think you get the idea. The only thing that I came to understand is that this is no way to ever comprehend these actions and attitudes. Such things are beyond real comprehension.
Beyond that, in the last 61 years I have witnessed the same distressing things happening over and over again. The names change. The places change. The "noble causes" for which people choose to pursue their crusades change. But basic nature of the events and ideas are fundamentally the same.
So now it is time for me to start breaking up my collections and giving this accumulation of things away so that others can use them. I no longer need them to get a sense of what I see happening about me in the world. I cannot really do a lot to change the inexorable outcomes. And if I try to cry out to stop these injustices, only a small number of people will listen to me and even fewer will join me to change things. And even if I try to fundamentally change the course of a given situation, there is no guarantee that things will not once again deteriorate to what they were before. So all these books and articles no longer serve the purposes I originally bought them to serve.
Now I have to move from collecting things and move on to doing what little I can to make a difference in the world. Even having all these things, much less collecting new ones, will only serve to slow me down.
While I still can, I want to make difference in the world, even if it is only a small difference. That means I will need to have to rethink how I use my time, my energy and my money in the time I have left. Just having things like books or information won't help me hugely. I need to focus on touching the lives of other people in good way. I need to focus on taking action.
So if I am no longer an obsessive collector of things, it is only a sign that my priorities have changed. That is growth. That is personal evolution That is a good thing.
