Optimization...

Nothing much is new this week but I feel like typing anyway.  I've started writing one new track that I still have no idea what to do with, prepared two voice over auditions, one of which I couldn't submit because I was invited to audition by the system way too late (mere minutes before they closed the auditions), and have been cleaning my apartment in my spare time, i.e. throwing things out willy nilly.

Getting rid of things I don't need anymore has been on my mind since the turn of the new year.  Even slightly before.  Probably because I was going through piles of stuff in my parents' garage while in Raleigh, NC during my vacation, and realizing that there's so much shit in there I'll never look at or need again.  On top of that some of the mementos I couldn't part with...tapes of my old band Buggstar, a printout of the story I wrote when I was a kid (by the way, it's terrible, I started trying to read it again), videos from college...could easily be digitized.

And the books?  Well, the books could be sold.  I took a selection of about 12 of them and put them up for sale on my Amazon seller account.  Within mere hours, some of them started to sell.  And some of them were actually worth a big enough chunk of change to justify bothering to sell them.  In fact, when I got back to Brooklyn and took a look at what books I had here that I wanted to get rid of, I realized I had at least 7 or 8 books that I didn't even look at anymore.  One of them, a graduate school text book from one of my seminars that I'm not sure why I didn't try to sell back in 2008, was going for $195, used, on Amazon because there were only about 4 of them.  A new copy was selling for a little over $400.  I never found out why this book was worth so much but I was thrilled.  Skeptical but thrilled.  Still, thinking that no one would possibly fork over that much money for it but that it couldn't hurt, I put it up for sale anyway, undercutting the others a little.  And wouldn't you know it?  In a matter of days, it sold.

This all has really made me want to pare things down even more.  I mean, I just got rewarded for downsizing!  So, I've been getting practically ruthless with my discarding of old things, spending as little as 10 seconds deliberating before chucking in the trash the weight of years of pack rat-ism.  And I don't even hang on to that much stuff!

It is such a great feeling to be free of the clutter of the years and to move forward into the future unburdened.  Yes, at this point, I'm not just talking about the clutter of physical things.  I'm talking about leaving behind bad habits, behaviors, friendships even.  Clearing some of these things out has made it so that I can see more clearly what's important to me, as with random junk as well.  And not just what's important, but what's necessary.  Being able to determine what you really need to function can be very cleansing.  I think of my life now as a piece of software that I have just optimized.

There's obvious value in having a physically clutter free environment in which to work efficiently.  But fixing all of this other stuff that I realized was slowing me down in my career goals and even in my personal development is quite invigorating too.  I guess this is what new years are for.

I'm not going to bother going into specifics but suffice it to say, I've been examining a lot of things lately that haven't been working for me and looking into why they haven't been working.  I guess, to put it rather broadly, the space that I have cleared in my apartment to have a cleaner more spacious working and living environment is analogous to the time I have cleared in my schedule by breaking habits, the mental space I have cleared by dropping bad friendships or just not spending time and energy on them and the emotional space I have cleared by not wasting my energy on things that aren't serving me.   It has renewed my dedication to my career and my understanding of how important it is to me to keep at this thing that I do.  Especially since I remember all to well how I almost allowed myself to give it up for a person who didn't care, years ago.  Never again.  Never again.