The freedom of limitations

 

Photo by Gaelle Marcel
on Unsplash

When I was a child my mother and I made regular trips to the local library to change our books.

At that time the library had a number of limits placed on borrowing: you could only borrow ten items at a time, and you could only borrow them for two weeks. You could, of course, renew the items you hadn't finished with (provided no one had placed them on hold), but there were limits to the amount of times you could do that, too. If I recall correctly, you could only renew something twice before you had to bring it back in.

So we had a regular day when we would go through the library and pick the 10 things we wanted the most. If there was anything we hadn't finished before we went back to the library for our next visit, we had to think carefully about whether we wanted to keep it for longer (and thus have even fewer new books to choose) or call time on it and look for a better book.

When most of the books I borrowed were picture books, I'd chew through those quite quickly. As I progressed to longer books, it started to become more of a challenge to finish the books I borrowed before the next library trip - but the limit of 10 books always meant there was a fighting chance I would be finished with everything I actually cared about before our next visit.

Then the borrowing allowance increased, and so did the borrowing time. At the same time fines were removed, so there was less incentive to actually pay attention to due dates.

Like most voracious library users, I saw this as a good thing, but I realise now that the old restrictions gave me something that the "new" freedoms took away: focus.

To be honest, the old restrictions weren't a burden. They didn't restrict the number of books you could read or finish. Just the number you could have on your "To Be Read" pile at any given time. At any time, if you wanted more books, you could get them. You just had to bring back the ones you were done with first. The whole library was still your playground. Just with more structure.

When you can only have 10 items at any given time, you think about what you actually expect to read this time. You think about what is most appealing to you. You think about what you're going to read next.

Now the current limits in the public library are 25 items for 1 month, which doesn't seem like a lot extra, but it oddly is. It's more than enough rope to lose track of what you have and how long you've had it - and more than enough to encourage me to borrow a book in case I get around to reading it (which I might not). And since they don't have any real consequences for ignoring the due date, I'm less likely to notice when it's due (yes, I'm the kind of person who needs incentives to make my brain pay attention to things). 

The library I work in (which is a different library) is worse. Staff and students can borrow unlimited books which automatically renew an unlimited number of times (as long as no one requests them). I realised, at one point, that I had almost two shelves worth of books that I had checked out to read "at some point", which I had barely looked at for months - some I'd had for years. When I looked at my account recently, I noticed that I had checked out a book in 2019 that I still haven't finished. It's just sitting in my house, waiting for me to get around to it.

When the sky is the limit, what's to keep you from floating away?

As I have been going through my house trying to wrangle it into some kind of order, I noticed a large part of the "clutter" that was weighing on me was the number of books that didn't belong to me that I had to get around to reading so I could return them.

So I've recently started to impose my own 1980s borrowing limits. I'm a little over (I currently have 11 books from each library), but my goal is to only ever have 10 items on loan from any given library, and to return them by the due date without renewing them (it's going to be tricky with the autorenewals, but we all need goals).

To help me focus on only what I actually think I have time to read, to give myself the incentive to borrow only what I most want to read "next", and to stop filling my house with books that don't belong to me, I'm going to take away the "freedom" that my libraries have given me and go back to the limitations they so kindly removed years ago.

Perhaps the limitations will set me free...