Today’s Daily Prompt is “The Things We Leave Behind”.
Over the past four weeks I have left behind a grat deal.
I moved from a three bedroom house to a small bedsit and many years of accumulated “stuff” had to go.
Letting go of furniture was easier than I thought. I had several pieces from my parents that I thoughtI had an emotional attachment to but when the decision came it was easy to let them go. They are just objects, large ones at that, and memories persist without them.
A number of smaller objects stayed because they strongly invoked not just memories of people but memories of them at a particular point in time or space.
I also decided that a great number of my tech books could be left behind. They are indeed left behind. In this day of constant net access and sites like Stack Overflow the need for tech books as reference material disappears. I personally like books for learning but no longer as reference.
The other pile that was left behind in a similar way were almost all my DVDs. I kept a few and a fair collection of Blu-Ray discs but most of my media is now on the computer. Another technology left behind, anyone still playing VHS tapes?
I discarded a lot of toys. I don’t know what it is about us nerds but we do love our toys. I kept a few like both my Rubik’s cubes. One’s usually unsolved and the other is displaying some pattern or other (‘cube in a cube in a cube’ and the ‘T pattern’ are my favourites). Way back in my late teens I spent months looking at the theory of the cube (blame Douglas Hofstadter and his “Metamagical Themas” column in Scientific American for that) and developed my own solution. It wasn’t a good solution but is was mine. I have it documented somewhere and if I really try I can still use it to solve a cube but I have to be really careful getting the last, bottom slice of the cube done as the transforms get long and ugly. I instead use a much better solution when I’m solving a cube just for the fun of solving. If you’re looking for a decent method then the one at the official cube page is excellent.
T Pattern
Cube in a cube in a cube
I also kept about three “magic snake” puzzles. Marvellous way to keep my brain occupied while watching TV or a movie is to play with them. So far I’ve discovered five different ways of spiralling one.
Magic Snake
Left behind was a need to be surrounded by stuff. I had a woman help me from a declutter service and I don’t know what it was but just her presence there made the decisions easy. At one stage she said to me “You’re doing extremely well. You’re being quite decisive” and I felt quite complimented. It was an unusual me in a lot ways.
I may have left behind a lot but I’m looking forward to a smaller life.
Tony's Texts 