Book Freak is one of four newsletters from Cool Tools Lab (our other three are the Cool Tools Newsletter, Recomendo, and What’s in my bag?).

In each weekly issue of Book Freak, we offer three short pieces of advice from books. Here’s the advice from our latest issue.

Clutter fills the future with the past

“An interesting thing about records is that we tend to see them again. That’s what they’re there for, after all. There’s something about looking backward, however, which seems to damage the soul.

Reactivating dead thought patterns, over and over again, we can feel old desires like ghosts, moving us this way and that as we put ourselves under their sway again. A 15-year-old boy remembers wanting to become an astronaut. A 23-year-old man laments a lost girlfriend. Even the little things carry ghosts: a shopping list never fulfilled for an old project, a half-finished drawing, a story idea in a line.

If the bad memories nag, happy memories can be even worse. Winning a medal in sixth grade. Old soccer trophies. A special love letter. To be sure, we remember these times with love and fondness, but there is also something bad there. There can come to be a strange gnawing feeling and a dissatisfaction with a present that can never live up to the polished memories of old expectations.

Be careful of what you force yourself to remember. Be mindful when sending messages to your future self, because it might not want to be bothered so much.”

― Lion Kimbro, Mind Performance Hacks: Tips & Tools for Overclocking Your Brain

Should you keep it?
“If you have it, use it. If you don’t use it, don’t have it.”

― Nagisa Tatsumi, The Art of Discarding: How to Get Rid of Clutter and Find Joy

Think twice before you buy

“Decide before you purchase anything where you are going to keep it and what you are going to use it for. If your answers to either of these questions are vague, then you are about to purchase clutter. Desist from buying.”

― Karen Kingston, Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui

06/27/19