Way to Unwind for a Tiresome day

In times of mental turmoil, it's very much advisable to look into our own homes, our bedrooms and closets, our garage and storage rooms, our kitchen cabinets and the forgotten spaces under our beds.

In times of distress, it's very useful to clean up, declutter and renew, find old things you forgot you had and thus give yourself a nice present, get rid of things you don't use anymore, being thankful to them that you once did.

We own a lot of books in this house. The count might be over two hundred. It is the result of manymanymany years of hoarding. Both me and my husband @blackweed are book lovers. I found myself troubled by a bad combination of a thousand to-dos, a couple of hundred kilos of past clinging to my shoulders, and the voices of about a dozen people inside my head telling me that what and how and when I do things is very very wrong.

Busy hands are happy hands... So I started my mental health - declutter process. Just as a mental exercise, I sat down and perused the titles we own -a total of five shelves- and wondered which books I would keep and which ones I would leave behind, if I ever decided to downsize to a minimum.

Reason N° 1 for doing this: Self knowledge. Most of the things I've read I would not read again, and most of the things I have not read don't interest me anymore; most of the reference books I own are no match for the info I can find online, and, as for the rest, I didn't even know I had them to begin with.

Reason N° 2 for doing this: Assessing real importance. We treasure things, and the reasons why we treasure each little thing are enough to fill pages and pages. I rather have a book I treasure than five shelves of blah...

Dare if you can, if you are a book lover, book hoarder, book collector such as myself. Take this #challenge with me and write down in the comments what is your list of books to treasure and keep. Let's make a conversation out of this.

My Personal List of Books to Keep Forever
(not as small as I had hoped, but I am lucky to have many items I do treasure)

1. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
2. The Pendulum of Focault by Umberto Eco
3. Baudolino by Umberto Eco
4. Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
5. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
6. A Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
7. Baltasar and Blimunda by José Saramago
8. All 7 Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling
9. The Trilogy of the Lord of the Rings by J.R. Tolkien
10. Of Love and other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez
11. The Hannibal Lecter Trilogy by Thomas Harris

And that's it. I can't find any other book I'd take with me. This is the most minimalistic downsizing I would manage. Still enough to fill a large suitcase. The seven Harry Potters alone would have me paying a fee for extra weight.

I hope this article finds you in the right mood, and at the right time.

An article I wrote a while back about book number 10 here https://steemit.com/etymology/@blankcanvas86/concept-of-the-day-grapes-book