1.Don’t pickle thing. I started to formulate something similar in my mind after throwing away nice samples that I “saved” but this advice is more memorable and sticky.

2. Racism in photography changed because of chocolate and furniture — not the people that it misrepresented. Another example of humans being horrible to each other.

3. Inspiration for non-linear career path.

4. Minor shift in perception from a bookseller to reading experience seller has revolutionized Canada’s largest bookstore, Indigo.

5. Maybe I’ll join the retirees migrating back to Manhattan when I retire by not leaving the city at all.

6. Perhaps I should give myself more than 30 min before bed to enjoy the book.

John Gardner, the literary critic, wrote that the job of the novelist is to create a “vivid and continuous dream” for the reader, but I’d somehow developed a case of readerly sleep apnea. I’d gotten into the habit of consuming novels so fitfully that I was all but sealed off from their pleasures. It was as if I’d been watching movies in a special buffering-only mode, or listening to music through the world’s balkiest Bluetooth headphones.

7. This piece makes me re-think what an estate sale really is.

I believe that the physical things you collect as you move through your life…add up to something more than their individual utility or aesthetic appeal or heirloom potential….t is a physical autobiography you write by living.

You’re the centrifuge holding all of this stuff together, the sun at the center of your universe of physical objects.

Photo by Kerri Shaver on Unsplash