OK, “hesitating” doesn’t really sound too much like living deliberately, but hear me out on this one.
I was up super-early this morning to get my son to his training camp. Then back home, to pay some bills and to wait for the truck to arrive to haul away our first pod.
While I was waiting, I packed another couple of boxes of things that won’t be going into storage, but will be coming with us to the house we will be living in for the next year. Then I went to the gym to climb. Then I came home, and I cleaned out and refilled our small, backyard pond. Then I made dinner. And so on.
So I did alot today, but when I started to think about what I had been focusing on today, and what I would be writing about tonight… I was coming up blank.
That’s when I remembered the big tub of photographs.
It must be something like three cubic feet, and it is jam-packed with photographs from that era of parenting that pre-dates our purchase of a digital camera. And since our first child was born during that period (obviously), that means that this tub contains stacks upon stacks of nearly identical photographs of a sleeping infant.
My plan: take about an hour to clear out the vast majority of these photographs, keeping only the truly memorable or truly beautiful.
Easier said than done.
I started pulling out individual photographs and wandering over to my wife with them. First one or two, but soon I had a dozen or so photographs laid out on the table… and I had only just skimmed the surface of that box.
So it looks like tonight is not the night to tackle the photo tub. And that’s OK.
I’m sure we will get to it soon. And I’m sure we will be holding onto quite a few keepers.
365 Simplify 
I hate going through photos! I just can’t get rid of anything it feels like, so right now I have just taken all of them and put them in one huge box, for “later”, whenever that may be…….. 🙂
So true. If I could get to some easy ones, I think the process would go more smoothly. Unfortunately that top layer had so many cute shots!
It takes great courage to simplify photos. It took me a few rounds over a short period of time. My top qualifier for keepers was, “Does it make me smile either on the inside or the outside?” May the Force be with you!
That’s good guidance, Julie. Thanks!
Before our last move, I condensed 60 photo albums (with 100 pages each) down to 20 photo albums. Very time consuming, but worth it since now the photo albums don’t contain images that have not withstood the test of time.
That said, it might be that waiting until AFTER you move (i.e., hesitating) makes sense for this project.
Good point–maybe I can quickly get rid of the easy ones in the next week or so, and then trim down even further after the move. Who knows–maybe we can actually get the photos we love out of this tub and into a few albums!