Regrets, I Have Some

I do not have any major regrets in life. Getting married at age 18? Still going strong. Officially changing my major five times in college? It helped me find the path I am on today. My regrets are much smaller - including all of the times I have purged my bookshelves.

When I was in middle school, I remember discovering the second-hand bookstore The Reader's Corner on the corner of 13th Street and Woodlawn Avenue in Wichita, Kansas. Not only did this shop sell books - it would even buy them back! What could be better? I was on the cusp of high school and promptly sold all of the books that I relegated to a different era of my life, including my entire collection of The Babysitters' Club. Now, with my own children, I feel a palpable longing for these books, a sadness that I cannot simply hand them one of those paperbacks with the well-creased covers and the large cursive "Amy Stilson" scrawled inside.

Nothing, however, compares to the pangs of regret that I feel for the vast purge of our bookshelves that we carried out in 2015. We were moving houses in town and needed to stage our cluttered house to sell it. Having installed new flooring the year earlier in the living room, we had already relegated nearly all of the books that we owned to the spare bedroom in the basement. Purging them, we rationalized, would give us space and freedom and set us free. Instead, I feel an immense loss every time I think of one of the books we lost on our transition from six tall bookshelves in the living room to only two. Books that I would love to have our daughter read, such as The Westing Game, books that I would love to loan to others, such as The Help, or books that I would simply like to touch the spine and feel again, such as The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

In recent years, I have also transitioned into being much more of an e-reader than a physical-book reader. Not only do most of my reading selections come from the library - but when I do purchase a book, I tend to purchase the Kindle version for both instant gratification as well as easy access on my phone whenever I want to read a book for a few minutes. This leads to much less clutter around the house. But it also means that our bookshelves continue to be much barer than they were before and I feel a visceral yearning for the sight of the filled shelves from floor to ceiling.

So much of what we discard and pass on frees us to live our best life. But sometimes, we end up giving away parts of our soul - and feel a little emptier forevermore.