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Books.
Decisions.
Yes. No. No. Yes. No. No. No. No. No. . . .
I was sorting books from my library, preparing
for a yard sale. Since we're moving next year to
an apartment less than half the size of our present
house, I had some strict, almost harsh criteria:
· When did I read it last?
· What plans did I have to read it in the
future?
· Where would I put it in the new place?
Many old favorites bit the dust - reference books,
grammars, books on usage. Although I've been a writer
for nearly 40 years, I hadn't consulted the books
in a long time. And most of the information was
available on-line anyway.
Books I had kept for obscure or long-forgotten
reasons met the same fate - mostly college textbooks.
Introductions to linguistics and texts on psycholinguistics
published in the late 60s would surely be out of
date.
Then there were the self-help books I was once
addicted to, and books on men's issues. Warren Farrell?
Out. Thomas Moore? Out. Sam Keen's now-classic Fire
in the Belly. Rich Zubaty's gritty What Men Know
That Women Don't. Out. Out. Iron John. Men and the
Water of Life. Out. Out.
What's going on here? It looks like I've abandoned
men's issues, both social and spiritual. Or is everything
so old-hat that I've memorized all the good parts?
Neither.
Rumi and Shams
As I was going through the hundreds of books, I
thought about the story of Rumi, the 13th-century
Sufi poet and mystic, when he first encountered
Shams, a 60-year-old spiritual wanderer. Rumi had
surrounded himself with books and learning. Shams
came along and, according to the story, tossed Rumi's
books and manuscripts into a well. As an ecstatic
poet of spiritual love, Rumi would not need any
books.
OK, I'm not an ecstatic Sufi, far from it, and
don't expect to be in this lifetime. But there was
perhaps an important lesson in Shams's extreme behavior.
It was at least an important lesson for a book addict,
and it takes the form of a question: At what point
will you have read enough, and learned enough theory,
so you can actually live the things you know and
stop stuffing more and more things into your head?
It's not as though I've spent a hundred percent
of my life inside my head, with my nose crammed
into book after book. But there was always the temptation
to defer to some expert who had something to say
(sometimes with statistics to back it up) about
relationships, men's exploitation, feminists' bending
of the truth, and so on. And then there were the
guides to men's spirituality or spirituality in
general. How does one become a "good"
Buddhist? How much history do I have to know? What
are the "right" practices? Although I
may have been pretty good at practicing what I read
and sometimes wrote about, there was always one
more - heck, dozens more - unread books beckoning.
Enough.
Time to travel light for the rest of the journey.
Time to live more fully the principles I've picked
up from reading. Time to put the head stuff more
into the body.
The Keepers
I did keep some books. So, what were the keepers?
Well, there's Coleman Barks and John Moyne's Essential
Rumi. Every time I open my dog-eared copy, I find
something new. Poems I've read dozens of times yield
up new delights on each reading. Then there's a
book I've been meaning to read for over thirty years,
and I'll either get to it or be buried with it:
Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
More Rumi. A couple of dictionaries and reference
books. Italian grammars and dictionaries (I'm still
studying Italian). A few more books of poetry. In
all, probably fewer than two dozen.
How about you? Is there something you need to get
rid of or weed through - some collection that has
taken on a life of its own and is maybe dragging
you down in some way? What would you keep? Why?
My impending move was a great motivator. Here are
two other exercises you might consider:
· When I was active in long-distance bike
touring, I'd come back from a trip and lay out on
the bed everything I'd carried. What had I not used?
Out. What turned out to be too heavy to be worth
hauling up mountains? Out. In biking, and in hiking
and perhaps in life, some burdens get heavier and
heavier the longer we carry them.
· Some friends were talking one day about
the one thing we would take with us in a disaster-evacuation
or to exile on an island. I think that, once we
have named that one item, we can get some perspective
on the thousands of other items in our lives.
If it weren't for the move, I'd still have all
my books and other junk - the accumulation in some
cases of over half a century. I would guess that
most people won't weed out their physical and psychic
baggage until some outside force intervenes.
But it's at least worth thinking about.
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