Holding on to Everything

Poet Donald Hall told the story of a hermit in New Hampshire, a man who passed away leaving behind sheds full of hoarded stuff. In one of the sheds was a box labeled, “string too short to be saved.”

That’s what we do with the trivia that gets in the way of our best work. The tiny slights, the small rejections, the bumps in the road that could be easily forgotten. Ideas too useless to be saved. But we save them nonetheless. This is the cruft (i.e. trash) that keeps…