kudos

I'm feeling positively virtuous.

Today I finally made a deal with myself: take 30 minutes and go through my videotape archives. That's fancy talk for a small wicker trunk chock-full of taped movies that have moved with me twice.

In the time since I lovingly taped black-and-white and other favorite movies on Sunday afternoons most of them have been immortalized on DVD and are readily available when and if I want to see them again. "Watch" is the operative word. I've been storing -- not watching -- them for years. So today I finally let them go.

I kept a dozen or so personally meaningful tapes, and a handful to enjoy before I let them go as well. This might seem much ado about nothing -- two bulging bags of nothing, but I accomplished two things for myself in that brief time today:

1. I finally took on a task that I'd resisted for years because I valued good movies and thought of mine as a collection. Yes, they were fine films but the videotapes were dusty and degraded by now. I wouldn't have had a storage problem if I'd remembered to value the movies not the tapes. Not to mention that technology has moved on as well.

2. I also stopped holding out for a large chunk of time. I struggle with taking small bites of anything including "to do" lists so this was a tectonic shift for me. Easy for some people, but it's just not my style to move quickly through things other than ice cream. Still, it thrills me that I can change. Well, maybe not the ice cream part, but...

So I'm here to say that even though no one else can tell that my videotape glut is gone, I feel lighter. In some strange way I've been burdened for years by the notion that I really should watch each and every one of those movies again sometime. I should live so long.