A desk that disappears
Six years of subtracting things from a workspace, and the three that earned their place.
1 min read
In 2019 there were about thirty things on my desk. I counted, because I was writing about it. There are now three, and the reduction took six years, which is a rate of roughly four objects a year and tells you something about how hard the last few were.
The interesting part is not the minimalism, which is mostly a photograph waiting to happen. It is which three survived, and why they are not the three I would have predicted.
The survivors were never the tools
A lamp, a notebook, and a small stone that Ellen Marsh gave me off the floor of the banker shop. Two of those are not tools at all.
What went was everything that was there in case. Every object justified by a possible future need turned out to cost more attention than the need was worth. What stayed is what gets touched daily, plus one thing that is there to remind me of a sentence.
(There is also a fourth thing, a pencil sharpener shaped like a globe, which I have moved to a drawer purely so that I can keep saying there are three.)
Thirty objects to three, and the two that matter most are a notebook I write one line a day in and a piece of somebody else's floor.
