Last night I was watching the animé series Honey and Clover and was struck by this soliloquy from Hagumi Hanamoto, the (somewhat disturbingly) child-like painting student, as she ponders a Rodin sculpture in an art history book:

There are so many things I want to try to do. There is an endless amount of things I want to try to make scattered inside of me. I chase after each of the images that fly by, catch them, wrestle with them, verify the taste and drink them down, name them, and return it to the appropriate place…. I want to open all of these boxes, but a human’s life is too short to open them all. There is a limit to the number of boxes that one human can open in a lifetime.

There are a lot of things I would like to do, and many of them revolve around making things. I’d like to be better at some things I already do, and I’d like to try new things. It’s very easy to close the door on these things and ignore them, to lie down with my iPad and read whatever comes up on Twitter, Reeder, Zite or Pinterest — or to watch lengthy animé series, for that matter. And I think that sometimes that’s okay; sometimes work and other commitments take up all my energy and all I want is to be distracted for a little while. But these kinds of distractions tend not to be very satisfying, so I want more — I subscribe to more feeds, follow more people, install more apps, keep hitting the refresh button to see what’s next, and then it’s more of a habit than anything else. And then I’m not opening boxes.

My friend Dinah emailed me after the On Simplifying post and congratulated me on my positive Discardian shift. Dinah came up with the concept of Discardia — a holiday that celebrates letting go of things that are getting in your way — about 10 years ago, and she recently wrote a book about it. I wasn’t thinking about Discardia when I wrote my post, though I’ve known about it for years and have sometimes even deliberately celebrated it. But when I read Dinah’s book there were parts that echoed some of the things I’ve been thinking about lately, and she gave me some ideas for moving forward. So if I’ve touched a nerve with you at all, you might want to check her book out for yourself.