When I feel low, one of the surest ways to cheer myself up is to give things away—furniture, kitchen gadgets, food. Today it’s books.

The natural disasters of late are encouraging me to be lighter, so that I might be able to pick up and relocate at the first drop of rain. Books are heavy, take up a lot of room, and the truth is, I rarely read a book a second time.

Climate change puts a new meaning to the phrase, “And this is why we can’t have nice things.”

One of the delights of this process is thumbing through the rejects and being surprised by the passages I’ve annotated. In The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, for example, there was a single dog-eared page marking a story about how hard it was to get farmers in Iowa to accept a new drought-resistant seed during the Depression. I've recited this story to people many times, but always attributed it to Damon Centola’s book Change, a book I read two decades after Gladwell's, with no memory of having read it previously.

Then there are the notes I wrote to myself, by name, in the margins. For example, in Stephen King’s book On Writing, he shares his struggles to write, even though he was teaching creative writing at the time, telling himself many novelists didn’t start until they were much older. To which I noted, “Start writing now, Jen.”

Alas, advice I did not follow.

I mean, sure, I have written this newsletter for a decade. I’ve technically been writing. But I was urging myself to stop fiddling around, to stop writing in the margins of my life and “go pro,” as Steven Pressfield might say.

Which made me wonder: if I don’t remember or act on what I’m reading, what are all these books for?

What if, instead of trying to read as many books as possible (a goal I’ve pursued for years), my focus was on internalizing a select group of books from those I’ve already read? How would I choose this smaller, select group of books? What if I could do more than just repeat what a book said, but I could also detail how it changed my choices, and if I was lucky, my life?

Reading just a small collection of books until I knew them as well as my own face would be very, very hard for me. Am I a book addict? No need to judge.

But the whole point—of reading, of life—is to play with our own beliefs and be willing to turn them upside down. To not just be entertained or impress people with our vast knowledge, but to reflect deeply and turn those stories and case studies into our own life experiments.

So you can see why I had to get rid of those books, why I'm considering doing the opposite of what I've always done, and abandoning my “to read” list for a “to read again” list.

As Ted Lasso reminds us, “we’re talking about practice.”

Not the game of life, not the game we all die trying to play as well as we can. Practice. It’s the time we get to play around with how we approach things while the stakes are low and the variables are somewhat under our control.

Every hard thing you attempt—whether it’s culling your library or following a regular exercise routine or going pro on the thing you can’t erase from your heart—you’ll learn something important about yourself. Something that hopefully will help you navigate the hard things you don't choose or control.

The future is going to demand much of us. Practice.