I was in the air. Flying home. Crammed against the passenger next to me, I noticed she was reading “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” From the title alone, I knew I wanted some of that life-changing magic even if I had to tidy up to get it.
By the time I got home, I had decided to clean out my home office – no matter that it was December and the holidays were hard upon us. I began with a vengeance.
It’d been two years since I’d finished my doctoral dissertation at UTC on the early days of Chattanooga’s revitalization, and I still had papers stacked and scattered on my desk – transcripts of interviews, copies of articles, folders, documents, books with pages marked and multiple versions of my manuscript. The mess acted like a clog in a drain. My life couldn’t move forward until all this was flushed.
It’s easy to toss the obvious things like handwritten notes you can barely decipher or multiple copies of things. But then it gets serious – you have to handle every piece of paper in order to decide what to do. Some of it was important, even if I didn’t need it anymore. If it had served me when I was doing research, maybe it would be useful to someone else.
Would anyone ever want to research Chattanooga Venture or Chattanooga in the 1980s? Probably no one currently in Chattanooga, I thought. They were too busy creating the next decade, not reviewing the past.