Ditchin’ the DVDs

Well, the cases anyway.

This was harder than I thought it would be.

But I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner.

We’ve already been gradually whittling down our books and DVDs. Eventually, we’ll probably be close to 100% digital/cloud/whatever, but until time and money permit, we’ll just work with what we have and continue gradually purging anything we wouldn’t want to watch/read over and over again, or loan out to friends. We don't currently have Netflix or HuluPlus or anything like that.

Just to be clear, I love old-fashioned, regular old books and will probably always have a few favorites around to treasure. But I don’t need tons. We are avid patrons of the public library. One shelf-worth of grown-up books and one shelf of kid books to own at any given time will suffice for me. Except for a handful of odds and ends in storage, we’re pretty much down to that after my latest purge.

But back to the DVDs. Today I ditched the cases and liner notes. It was hard – some of them really are kind of special. The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition has lovely artwork all over the box. West Side Story Collector’s Edition comes with a script. But like many of you, I did this with my CDs a long time ago. I had to ask myself now, do I ever think longly about all those liner notes and cases? The answer is no. So I was ready.

I had an old CD binder laying around with a few random CDs in it, so once I sorted through those and consolidated, I used that binder for all the DVDs. Now I can get rid of an entire bookcase in my bedroom (also used to contain a few books, but was able to consolidate those to the one-kid-one-adult-shelves) and a crap-load of worthless plastic. And our movie collection is now so portable, compact, and easily accessed, at least considering it's non-digital.

And it was hard--but only while I was actually doing it. Now, I'm completely fine. And that reminded me of an important downsizing lesson. A lot of people tell me they just can't do it. They may be referring to a certain item or a group of items. They really would like to do it, but just can't. Today, I was reminded that, yes, it is kind of a bummer and it does actually hurt! I realized that I need to do a better job of acknowledging that this is true.

It hurts, but the end result is worth it, and it feels great.

Like so many things in life, eh?

Note: We're still holding on to our actual CDs in a binder because we like to listen to them in our older-model car on road trips, but I once I have time to make sure they're all burned into iTunes and I'll probably ditch 99% of them. It's a process!