How my life is coming apart, but on purpose

I'm slowly and methodically cleaning out my math office, getting ready to move to our big old administrative building.  And as part of this cleaning, I'm going through my 5-drawer filing cabinet, trying to think about what papers I might realistically actually ever look at again.

The answer seems to be, if I do think about it, "not a lot".   I've been teaching math here for almost three decades.  I've saved syllabi, grade sheets, exams, worksheets, . . . will I ever look at any of these again?  Probably not.   I've been on committees that wrote reports.  I've led workshops for other mathematicians.  So much paper from my past, paper that's not realistically likely to be a part of my future. 

So I've been cleaning out my file drawers, bit by bit.  Because it's me, I can't just chuck it all: the idea of creating so much trash would wig me out.  Instead, I've been pulling apart my life, little by little, separating things into piles.

Here's the main sorting center. 

Going clockwise-ish around the photo from the bottom left corner I see:

• a chair for sitting in,
• now-empty hanging folders,
• now-empty manilla folders, in good enough shape to reuse,
• colored printer paper with one side blank for reuse in other projects
• a six-inch stack of white printer paper with one side blank for reuse in other projects (ah, "precyled" paper!)
• an amazing collection of paper clips and binder clips, 
• a box of to-be-recycled printer paper (both sides already used)
• a small bankers box of paper that I might actually want to look at again, so I'll move it with me.

Not pictured is another box of mixed paper to recycle, and another giant box of to-be-recycled printer paper that already filled up, so that the photo above shows the second, not first, such box.  

Also not pictured is a pile of my past calculus exams, which I'll gift to our new visiting faculty members, which they can use (or not) to come up with exams of their own, or to offer to students as study guides.  I feel like that might actually be a helpful gift.  

I've finished about half of the filing cabinet now, maybe a tad more.  I'm about to get to the section with papers I've written, which will be a little bit harder to pare down, but still has vast potential for winnowing.  (I really, really, do not need draft copies of papers that I have final, formal versions of.  I probably don't even need paper copies of the final versions, but I bet I'll keep a copy of each paper anyway because . . . well, not sure, but I probably will).

This sorting, not surprisingly, takes a bunch of time.  But it feels good to do it.  It reminds me of what I've heard about something called "Swedish Death Cleaning", which I admit I don't actually know very well so I might have the description wrong, but what I seem to have heard is that this is the cleaning that elderly parents do of their own homes so the kids don't have to go through so much stuff after the parents die.  For me, this paper sorting feels like I'm saving some as-yet-unknown person (a family member, a colleague, who knows?) a bunch of headache of having to wonder which of these papers might be relevant to anyone else.