One Hundred Things

I was reading around somewhere on the Net the other day about a lady who had come to a crisis in her life.  You know that this was a U.S. lady because the crisis was all about having too many things.  Whatever occasioned it, she ended up deciding to re-rig her life so that it contained only 100 objects.  And now, of course, she's writing a book about it.  And when the book is published, she will have 101 things and will have to throw something out to make room for the book.

It's hard to imagine what there is for her to write about other than the fact of it.  You live with whatever you've got to live with.  On the other hand, my first response to her noting that she had retained three pairs of shoes was, "Would that be three things or six things?"  I mean, there are a lot of definitional problems that would have to be addressed and, although it would be interesting to solve that problem, I doubt whether it would be interesting to read about it.  Thus, is silverware one thing?  Or an infinite number of things, depending on the size of your silverware set?  If you are going for simplicity, surely one of each (knife, fork, spoon) should be adequate, and maybe getting a spork would cut it down to just two pieces accounting for silverware, one item.

Or maybe not.  One hundred things is doubtless possible for a life, although it would be a life in which you didn't do anything very complex: no fancy quilting, woodworking, cooking or baking, I'd guess.  I probably have a hundred things just in two or three kitchen drawers and I use them all the time.

But there are a lot of things we have, I have, that I don't use all the time and that are very numerous indeed.  Because we are moving out of our other house up in British Columbia, the disposing of stuff is much on my mind.  Lots of it is already gone.  But this past weekend, I was addressing the problem of CD's.  Somehow, between us, Ed and I, we have amassed, over the years that CD's have been with us, maybe 500 hundred of them.  We definitely are not listening to all that music.  In fact, we probably listen to fewer than a dozen of them in any given month, and fewer than thirty of them are residing in our computers for IPod  listening.

So, I decided to try the 100 item limit on CD's.  And I am going through them carefully.  Each one goes either into the pile of go or the pile of keep.  And at the end of the sort, if there are more than a hundred in the pile of keep, there will be another sorting of that pile until it is down to one hundred.  And a double disk CD counts for two items.

And then I'm going to take all those excess but excellent CD's to the Saturday Farmer's Market this weekend to see if someone else would like to take them on, or at least some of them on, for a tiny fraction of their original price.  And then I'll know what it's like to live with only 100 CD's.  And after that, maybe it would be worth trying to get down to three pairs of shoes?  Well, maybe not something that hard for a second act.  But I promise I won't turn it into a book.

Do me a favor; take these CD's off my hands.  Saturday.  9 a.m.  Community Center.  A price that is a mere token.