A New Home for My Books!

Over a period of some years, I had accumulated a fairly large personal library. I had spent much time, and also quite some money, in building this collection, which contained maybe a few thousand books. My general practice is that after I’m through with a book, I dispose of it if and when I can, by either selling it or gifting it. But despite having sold or gifted several books, I still had a huge number left in my collection, unread. Were I to read them all with care, it might have taken me several years!

But then the other day, guess what I did? I decided to dispose of almost my entire library! To explain why briefly, my enthusiasm for those books had greatly waned. And so, over the next couple of days, with a friend’s help, I took out the vast majority of my books, put them into bags and boxes, sold a few at a bookshop and gifted almost all the rest to a college library. Now, only a few books remain in my shelves and drawers.

This experience presented me with a couple of good life-lessons. One of these is: Buy what you need and will use in the present. Buy the same item again only if you really need to and, also, only if and when you have finished with the one that you had bought earlier. So, for instance, if I buy a book, I should first finish reading it and only then consider buying a second book, and that, too, if I really need to. Failure to abide by this rule might easily lead, as it did in the case of my library, to spending much precious time and money buying and accumulating things that one may never use—and what a great waste of valuable resources that would be!

A second life-lesson I can draw from this experience is: Knowledge is to be had not simply from books but also from other sources. My penchant for reading books was perhaps rooted, in part, in the belief that knowing more things was good and that reading books about different things was a great way to know about them. I had been made to believe that being ‘well-read’, even a ‘bookworm’, was a good thing, and this likely greatly contributed to my love for books. But over time, I have come to realise that while books certainly can be a great means for acquiring wisdom and guidance, there are other channels for this purpose, too, including, and most importantly, the Inner Voice (that dwells within each of us), every single experience that we personally go through, and all the beings and objects we interact with on a daily basis. In short, not just books but everything that we meet with in life, within ourselves and without, is for us a potential means for learning. Since that is so, why restrict my learning just to books?

A third life-lesson that I can take from this experience is: If you have things that you don’t need and will not use, share them with others who might need and benefit from them. In this regard, I can say that I am very confident the books we gifted to the college library have found a much better home for themselves than the one they were in earlier. Hopefully, at least some students of the college, over maybe many generations, will benefit from them.

Giving the books away benefitted me, too, and one way this has is that I now have emptier shelves and drawers, which makes them easier to clean and manage! And this is a fourth life-lesson I can derive from this experience: De-clutter! If you relieve yourself of things that you don’t really need, your life can become easier, simpler and smoother!