The Spiritual Practice of Shredding Stuff by Kevin E.
Dayhoff May 15, 2013
Last month my wife and I left our house in the wee-hours of
the morning and joined other households in Carroll County for the shared
experience of putting box after box of
old documents
in a large ravenous shredder-truck which devoured the paper voraciously.
It was quite a liberating experience. Of course, there was a
certain irony in the ritualistic-feeding of the paper-eating monster truck
sponsored by the Carroll County Office of Recycling.
The vast majority of my papers to be recycled are from the
40 or so years I served on local, county or state boards, committees or
commissions – for many years, as an elected official – all of which were
accompanied by bringing home boxes of papers, documents and records. It was
only fitting and proper that I ‘give’ the papers back to the county.
The further irony is that many of those 40+-years were
served on various committees and commissions which focused on the environment,
municipal solid waste, agriculture, forestry, water and wastewater treatment –
and recycling.
I, for one, am quite thankful for the shredding service. The
recycling office reported that we were one of 316 other households that made
the trek to the county maintenance facility.
The paper shredder in my office only allows me to feed it up
to 16 pages at a time. At that rate, it would take me about two hours to shred
one box full of papers. The county shredding service saved me days of
mind-numbing work.
As I discussed in my column in
TheTentacle.com on June 20 last
year, “
Fighting
the ‘Stuff Monster,” goals are simply tools to focus one’s energy in
positive directions. These goals can change as one’s priorities change and new
ones are added, and others dropped.
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The nation's first countywide free rural postal delivery
service got off to a shaky and contested start Dec. 20, 1896, in
Carroll County.
According to multiple media accounts, including the
Baltimore Sun, "One of the first pick-ups postal clerk Edwin Shriver had
on the inaugural day of Carroll County's Rural Free Delivery service was a
greased pig…"
"I'm sure he (the customer) did it as a joke,"
said Shriver. "But I slapped a 42-cent stamp on its rump and delivered it.
That pig squealed the whole way."
A little over three years later, Charles Emory Smith, the
39th postmaster general of the United States and a journalist by trade, visited
Westminster on April 30, 1900.
If Smith were to come back today, he would find the current
state of affairs of the Postal Service look more like that haze produced by the
forest fire.
These days, the future beautiful vista at the post office is
less than clear, if my last visit there is any indication.
After I opened my box, I let out a squeal much like that of
that greased pig in December of 1896. I quickly realized that I had once again
fallen prey to the modern scourge upon the postal system that has significantly
impacted our lives today, junk mail, or as it is politely referred to by the
postal system, "standard mail."
Don't complain about the flood of unsolicited mail.
"The Postal Service is hoping to deliver even more," according to an
article in the
New York Times last September.
"Faced with multibillion-dollar losses and significant
declines in first-class mail, the post office is cutting deals with businesses
and direct mail marketers to increase the number of sales pitches they send by
standard mail…"
See also:
Kevin Dayhoff - The Tentacle: Fighting the “Stuff Monster”
There comes a time in a person’s life when one needs to get
a fresh supply of trash bags, buy a new heavy-duty paper shredder, back the
pick-up truck to the basement door, get out the large party-size coffee maker,
and clear the clutter.
For me, periodically fighting the “Stuff Monster” has been a
survival tool – or I would have been the tragic-lead character in a serial
reality horror show on hoarding a long time ago.
Yet, in my personal journey of a life-long struggle with the
“Stuff Monster,” the deck has always been stacked against me.
For, you see, my situation has been exacerbated by the fact
that I have been self-employed all my life. Many colleagues have been able to
fight the “Stuff Monster” much more easily because all the filing cabinets full
of papers and pallets of boxes in records storage, has been the responsibility
of their respective employers.
Well, with me – since the late 1960s – I’ve been my own
employer and keeping records, documents and stuff has always been my
responsibility.
And, of course, for the last 35 or so years, in addition to
art and farming, I have continuously served on any number of local, county or
state boards, committees or commissions – and for many years, as an elected
official – all of which was accompanied by my bringing home papers, documents
and records by the wheelbarrow load.
[….]
I am trying to go as paperless as possible.
My paperless initiative is in part, because technology has
advanced to the point that I can now handle many office and administrative
functions more efficiently - without paper.
However, my reasons for going as paperless as possible are
in part, as a matter of practicality. Above and beyond the fact that we travel
a lot and are simply not at home to get hardcopy paper-mail at our post office
box; at my advanced age, handling mountains of paper day-in and day-out has not
gotten any easier.
Curiously, after almost 40-years of office administration,
if you hand me a piece of paper, in several hours, I have no clue as to where
it is. However, I always seem to be able to find electronic paperwork… Caroline
will tell you that I have come to like reading online so much that I scan-in
letters and writing-newspaper-research materials just so that I can read it on
the computer…
Moreover, a large part of my decision to go paperless is a
product of my environmental activism, which in part springs forth from faith
beliefs…
Whatever - - I am a geek and although a few electrons may be
inconvenienced; paperless is far more efficient…
That said, LOL – the initiative sure has had some
interesting moments – and a few profound failures; however, it has been for the
most part, quite successful…
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