DAY 10 - Books

The 24 Things Clearing Challenge 
encourages you to make room in your home, heart, and mind to create an inspired future

I wasn't sure if I'd actually do this one. Let me clarify. The idea would be to go through my books and actually purge some of them. If my husband and I are blessed enough to live together for another 50+ years, our home will be overflowing with books. We are both Book Purchasers rather than Book Borrowers. We like to own our books. We like to dog-ear the pages. We need to write in the margins. We devour our books in a way that libraries and lending friends probably wouldn't appreciate.

I adore reading. Although that wasn't always the case. I'm not sure when exactly I got "hooked" but I remember really starting to love it in high school, then more so in college, and then even more when I worked for a wonderful woman in New York who loved books and would always recommend great ones to me.

Some of my books have changed my life. Some of them are so simple and sweet that I will read them again and again. Some of them are stories that I cannot wait to share with my children. And some of them are gifts from my husband that inspire me to be a better person. So I knew going through my books might be difficult, to say the least.

Ultimately, there were a handful of novels that I knew I probably wouldn't read again. So those will go to Goodwill or a nearby library. And I now have a Stack of Books I Borrowed From Friends That I Must Return. But this truly was a challenging process for me and I dearly wish to hold on to all the others.

The results of today's letting go: taking stock of the reading material I own and acknowledging the deep impact it has had on my life; the desire to read about a dozen books at once - there are so many good ones!