A small step, one that you’ve overlooked or maybe just didn’t want to see, may be pivotal in making a change for the good.
Ever since we had some of our upstairs floors re-done, our basement has been overflowing with boxes of books, clothes, and odd accumulations that we had moved out of the way of the workers.
These boxes joined all of the other items from the past that had found their way to our basement.
I’ve wanted to rid the basement of much of this stuff and could imagine the area with only the essentials—the ping pong table, the couch, the bookshelves, the treadmill.
But the reality has been that I’m hesitant to throw much of anything away , from my kids' elementary-school board games to their high school notebooks.
Today when I asked myself where could I take one easy first step, I knew what I hadn't wanted to see. At issue were not my kids' things. Nearly blocking the path into the basement are boxes filled with drafts from one of my long-ago writing projects, replete with Xeroxed copies of relevant and irrelevant articles. What would it take to pull those boxes out to the street for the garbage collector? Very little.
So what has been stopping me from doing this before? I suppose I have been thinking I would get to work on publishing something based on one of these drafts, but I don't need this physical reminder of unfinished business. It’s time to take this one small step to see where it leads me.
