Challenges with sorting books
I have a confession to make and as a professional organizer, you might be surprised to hear this. After completing my KonMari consultant training program, I was pretty excited to go through the process of sorting through all my possessions according to the categories outlined in the course. Why not practice on myself first, right? There’s a suggested order to follow to help us get better at making those decisions about what to keep and what can be discarded, starting with clothing, then books…
Sorting through my clothing was no problem - I made quick decisions and felt good about my growing pile of donations to be cleared away later. Once my closet was in order, I moved on to the next category - books. As I stood staring at the bookcases in my living room, I started feeling overwhelmed with emotions. Books can carry so many memories - how can I get rid of any of them? Books are our friends.
Oh boy, this was going to be WAY more challenging than sorting clothes. I sat down for a breather and thought about my connection to books and reading. My Mom was a voracious reader and she instilled this in me from a young age. As a child, I always had a book to read and could spend an entire afternoon devouring the latest Nancy Drew mystery or whatever I had on loan from our local library. Even more special, when my Dad travelled for work, Mom and I would have a simple dinner and read our books together at the dining room table. I also thought about all the money spent on textbooks and yes, there they were collecting dust at the bottom of the bookshelves. Many of them were quite outdated and not even worth anything on the resale market.
I started by removing all the books and stacked them up in piles on the floor for sorting. Textbooks - okay - those can go! Books given to me by friends that (honestly) I’m not going to read - add to the donation pile. Books I have read and don’t need to read again - yup, more donations. Okay, we’re making progress! Books that are damaged - including a few that were chewed by my dog in her puppy teething stage - those are for recycling. Books I have read and will read again or books that haven’t read, but want to - those are keepers.
After giving everything a good dusting, I started arranging the books back on the shelves - adding bookends and other decorative items and plants to balance out the display. Standing back to admire my work, there was more open space now - more “breathing room” for all the books, rather than having them squished together. Hey, maybe that wasn’t so bad after all - sometimes we just need to trust the process, even when its kind of uncomfortable or challenging. There might be a reward at the end…