Who to be?

I am dealing with a change in my life. My home office is moving. I’m going to be changing from a small room to a larger room. Now normally that wouldn’t sound like anything that requires downsizing, but it does give me a chance to examine what I think I am.

I’m going to end up with about the same amount of shelf space, but now all in one room. So in theory I could take everything that I currently have and I’d be OK. But do I really need all that?

Much of my income comes from being a “statistician”, but at this point in my life it seems unlikely that I’ll become a research statistician, so I can probably get rid of those journals I’m unlikely to ever read again. Besides, when I want to learn something new in statistics, I don’t pick up a book. Instead I turn to the web. So much is out there and often in a form much easier to deal with than a stuffy old journal article.

While I don’t make much money at writing (yet), I do consider myself a writer. (I do have a new box to fill out on my tax forms for royalties). But again, I have books on good places to send out articles, stories, poems, etc. but again when I’m looking for places to send stuff, it’s not to those books that I turn. Instead, once again, I turn to the web. Every month I go through lists of places that are looking for writing and I make a list of places that sound promising for the kind of stuff I write.

Do I really need my old dictionaries and other reference books? I should probably keep a paperback rhyming dictionary and a thesaurus if I could take them in to the field with me. But when I’m at home, again I use the web to research topics I need in my writing.

So here is a chance for me to start trying to figure out who I have become. The me I was just a few years ago certainly wouldn’t recognize this me I am now. So maybe it’s time to let go of some of that old me’s stuff.

Now I just need to figure out what can be done with this stuff.

If you would like to let me know what you think, send me an email at [email protected]. Or you can comment on my blog at http://mathnerde.blogspot.com/.