It was a quiet start to the week.

This morning after my morning meditation, I headed down to meet a girlfriend for breakfast however as I had forgotten my phone at home (which happens more frequently nowadays), I sat at the cafe waiting for her and reading my book. (Kikuko Tsumura’s, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job).

We had planned to go to Endota Spa to use up our gift vouchers and booked an hour long massage. I have a collection of these gift vouchers from pre-COVID days so now using the opportunity to treat myself to facials and massages when I need them.

However, throughout the massage all I could think about was breadfruit.

I swear my mind works in mysterious ways. It was because the protagonist in the book went on an adventure trying to find breadfruit crisps and I recalled my own obsession adventure into trying to find these elusive fruits myself. As a mad William Bligh fan, the whole mutiny on the Bounty had these fruits central to the story. Well, the fruits weren’t to blame but nevertheless….I too, had gone on a breadfruit discovery adventure only to stumble across them in Hawaii in 2019, the year I found the cursed breadfruit.

Well anyway, the masseuse was working away while I was thinking and wondering about this perplexing fruit.

That’s all I have about that story.

Well anyway….

When I came home, rather than relax a bit and chill, I decided to go through my desk drawers and ditch all my work in paper format.

There was tonnes of it.

All my ideas that I scribbled, note pads with ideas for courses, workshops and webinars related to learning, social networks and communities, out it all went.

Handouts, reference guides, downloaded e-books from sites long forgotten….OUT.

I only kept three pieces of paper.

The first was a paper I had torn out of a note book where I scribbled every single school I went to, address I lived at since 1969(there were many because we moved around a lot) and organisations I worked for. It was my own personal timeline – 54 years there on that scrap of paper.

The second was a RTE Mobile Journalism Cheatsheet on how to shoot and edit a Five Shot Sequence for storytelling. (I used to work as a Public Relations Officer in the Royal Australian Navy Reserve and part of my role was interviewing people in the Defence community and then writing stories for the Navy Reserve News – a role which I LOVED. I have been thinking of whether I can somehow find a job locally to work for a community newspaper – much like Ricky Gervais and his role as a local community newspaper journalist in the Afterlife – now that’s a job I would LOVE to do ..oh hang on, local journalism has since disappeared….)

The third was Kenneth Mikkelsen’s “Weekly Synthesis Questions” which I always found a good handout to summarise outcomes for the week.

I’m using this time now to go through my shelves and drawers and do a big clean out – a massive decluttering of my working life so I never have to refer to anything ever again. I don’t need to. In some way I feel that hanging onto it means that I’m hanging onto my past life. I don’t want that.

If I need it – I’ll start from scratch; with a new mind and a new approach.

OUT, OUT it all goes.

Exactly how the breadfruit was ditched off the BOUNTY by Fletcher Christian. OUT damn fruit of my labours.