When my father practiced medicine, the magazines he ordered for his waiting room came first to our house. One day I counted them.
Fifty subscriptions: information cascaded onto our living room coffee table spanning subjects from world affairs to kitchen hints; vocabulary building to sports; psychology journals to the latest discoveries in surgery. There were no movie star magazines, but Life, Look and National Geographic offered richer photographic eye candy anyway. These fueled my desire to see the world.
Magically, the magazines moved out of the house almost faster than I could read them. The local newspaper showed up on the front stoop each evening, yet never lingered in a stack the way mine do now. How to manage information inflow wasn’t a problem back then. At least, it wasn’t my problem, since I was just a kid passing through on the march to adulthood.
I have no idea where the mail went, either. One exception, of course, was the mammoth Sears catalogue. Handy for boosting a toddler up to table level when the high chair had been outgrown, that tome stuck around through Christmas dinner. We had no more use for it at this point anyway, since Santa must have sent it to help us kids write our lists, and his trip down the chimney was complete.
One file cabinet seemed to suffice for whatever needed to be saved back then. So why, I ask you, are we now drowning in piles?
Columnists recycle the same tips I read decades ago about what to keep and what to toss, but the list has expanded to the digital. Those bytes seem to reproduce at a rate unforeseen at their conception. When 4,000 emails languish on my various devices, I take a few stabs at unsubscribing; then turn my attention back to the living and breathing world around me, and within.
What matters will emerge, as mental clutter falls away. Order will follow, one piece at a time. (c)
