The times they are a changing

So now. My attempt to question and justify what I believe has led to some dramatic (for me) changes in perception in the last while. The next in the firing line is my hoarding nature.

Anyone who knows me fairly well will know that I am a very nostalgic person. I keep lots and lots of things. Here are some of them:

1. A Coke Can Collection I inherited from my brother when I was 8 and he let go at the age of 13. It is 20 years later and I have not yet let go. With a little (lot of) help, my last addition to the collection was in 2002 during the football world cup. The collection is now being stored in Cape Town and I have more than 400 different cans. I am not ready to let this go.
2. I have every card I have ever received, including ones sent to my parents congratulating them on my birth. Cards are slowly going out of fashion, or maybe I am just get older so birthdays are less significant... so their shoe box home has been and will continue to be sufficient.
3. A DVD collection of maybe (I haven't counted) 100 films. I feel this collections days are numbered in the same way my CD collection seems a little obsolete now that they are all on my ipod.
4. Many many photo albums. I love photos. I always took heaps but now don't have a digital camera other than my cellphone and have relied on others. I have a feeling photo albums are also going to become obsolete. I have converted 15 years of films to CD, so I can now throw away the films (for some reason this is one of the hard tasks I am struggling with).
5. I have more than 15 years worth of Sports Illustrateds. I like looking at the old copies and it provides adequate justification for getting the swimsuit edition each year. The days of this collection are numbered however. I can't justify keeping them. My mother happens to do art workshops for children and I think they will get more out of them than me. I don't like the idea of them being cut up... but equally, this is probably the most logical step for me to start the purge on my hoarding nature.
6. What got me thinking about this post was seth godin talking about the Kindle. I have a reasonable collection of books, but no one ever reads them. They are essentially decoration. A friend at university had a `open book policy'. He was the token BA student in my residence and a little different from most, but he had a great eclectic book shelf and was happy to lend books, and happy to borrow. He kept no record of who had what. He figured as long as he had roughly the same number of books as he thought he should, the world was in equilibrium. Nice idea. I feel that I should be giving my books away... it seems they would be doing better in someone elses hands. I should give them to someone with the express instruction that when they are done, they should do the same (with the same instruction). Certain books I am more likely to read again, perhaps I should keep? In honesty, my DVD collection and CD collection are larger than my book collection. I always thought the idea of building up a personal library was a nice one, but the kindle changes that, the kindle is a library the size of a book.
7. I also have a certain collection which only a certain few know about which is probably best kept quiet. Yup, I shouldn't write about it on a public blog... but most of the people likely to read this know about it anyway and it would be conspicuous by not being mentioned. One day when I am a famous artist all will be revealed ;-)
8. Clothes wise, I am at my worst. I was reminded of this when seeing someone recently I hadn't seen in years, and the clothes I was wearing being more recognisable than me! I should and will use this as the first point of my purging.
9. I have journals from since I was 9, all my creative writing from High School, and project from all the way through.
10. My uncle, knowing I like to keep odds and ends made me a very cool `memory box' in which I keep odds and ends. My rule is that if I can't remember the significance of the odds or ends, they have to go.

I should probably start with the CDs from (3), the films (4), the magazines (5), and the clothes (8). I feel kind of justified in keeping the rest.

Stuart argues that we store a lot of our personalities online through blogs and facebook. I imagine he would extend this to the things we own as well. While there are a number of things I have let go of, like religion and (in the process)patriotism, those were largely because of clear obastacles I believe those parts of my personality caused in my search for figuring things out. These other things seems like a part of me that does no one any harm, other than the storage difficulties.

But yes, I admit, it is time for a lot of the clothes to go.