I’ve started to clear out! No. I am not scarpering to avoid paying my debts, I am merely clearing out thousands (and I mean thousands) of files, folders, pamphlets, tracts and assorted records and leaflets from the office I share with my wife. In addition to three desks and chairs, three filing cabinets, shredder, computers and printers, there are shelves of the accumulated evidence of many years of self employment, as well as mountains of stuff from Defra, Trading Standards, Natural England, Environment Agency, Eblex, the NSA and goodness knows how many other official bodies that a small trading partnership has to deal with in order to earn a living.
TV gurus tell us that a tidy desk denotes a tidy mind. They are wrong! I think a tidy desk hides drawers full of stuff all jumbled up. However, because the rubbish has to go somewhere, I suppose it is better in a drawer than in the mind.
As a young man I was told that when writing, the difficulty is not so much what to say, as what to leave out. And sorting through a lifetime’s stock of paper proves the point. What do I throw away and what do I keep that cannot more easily be ‘Googled?’ And all this just to save my children having to throw away the stuff precious to me, but not to them!
It is not easy to part with a lifetime’s jottings, papers and books. This is because they partly represent a life’s work and one doesn’t like to think of it as being of no interest to anyone else. To put items in the rubbish bin feels like one’s own life has somehow become the detritus of history. A gloomy thought indeed!
However, all is not lost for the space thus cleared means opportunities to fill it up again! But this time, instead of filling steel cabinets with paper you can fill the cabinet of one’s mind. Fill it with words (and actions) which somehow didn’t get properly organised the first time.
Now is the time to forget as much as it is a time to remember! To forget the wrong done to you and the wrong done by you. Now is the time to fill one’s head with hope and optimism. A time to look kindly upon the foibles of one’s family and friends and to let one’s heart be filled with gratitude not grumpiness. Who knows? one might even stretch magnanimity towards those public figures who wrongly imagine that their parliamentary debates, committees and endless reports add to the sum total of human happiness. What fools are they who imagine that they can organise a river of munificence to carry happiness from Parliament to Preston, Donnington or Dymock.
Thank God that old age teaches us that happiness and peace do not come from those who tax us and then, when they give a bit back, expect us also to applaud them!
It is not the job of this column to tell readers where to look for personal happiness and inner peace, but it will not be found because secular politicians think up schemes for which bureaucrats then write books to fill our cabinets.
How about politicians clearing out the detritus from their present systems and, like old folk, empty their files and cabinets (and their minds) of old clichés then maybe, just maybe, their heads might have the space to hold the things that matter?
However, talking about old age and stubborn minds, reminds me of the Nebraskan farmer who was notoriously tight with money.
For forty years Ed and Norma had gone to the State Fair where Ed had always refused Norma’s pleas for a helicopter ride with the words: “Fifty bucks is fifty bucks.”
Last year a young pilot overheard them and said, “Look, I’ll take you for free, on condition you don’t utter a single word but if you do …. ‘It’s full price.”
Up they went, and the pilot flew all his best daredevil tricks. Over and over they went, but not one word! On landing the pilot said, “Gee, I’m really impressed. I thought you’d shout and be scared.”
Ed replied. “I was when Norma fell out …. ‘But fifty bucks is fifty bucks.”
View from the Pew 