My original impetus to begin my minimalist journey was when I realized I wasn’t aware of everything I owned.
As I began going through boxes and digging through the rooms of the house I had just moved into, I unearthed treasure after treasure…
…knick knack after knick knack…
…piece of debris after piece debris.
I was struck by the fact that there were things I didn’t even know existed in my house. Clothes I hadn’t worn in years…or at all. Trinkets from traveling in Paris and Rome. Almost two dozen pairs of scissors.
When I first started going through my stuff to throw away excess, I felt nostalgia creep up every time I found something I had forgotten about. I would open a box and something I wasn’t even aware existed a minute ago suddenly felt important because I remembered that at one point, it did mean something to me.
I thought “How sad that I can feel so strongly about something so trivial so easily,” and threw it away.
What about you? Are you aware of everything you own?
You might want to ask yourself, if you tried to write down everything you owned on a list from memory, how much of it would you miss? Forget to write down? Forget you even had?
What does that say about your stuff?
Better yet, how many hours or days do you think it would take for you to catalogue everything you owned?
At any given time, we can do one thing. We can only wear one change of clothes at a time, read one book, work on one computer, listen to one cd. So why do we feel like holding onto dozens of excess tee-shirts, and hundreds of cds, and four different backpacks enriches our lives at all?
It doesn’t.
Would you get rid of your past’s debris? For me? For you? Please?!
[I just switched my website from Drupal to WordPress. Is it vain that I’m sad my Twitter and Facebook share counts were reset to zero? Apologies if this spams my e-mail subscribers with past posts! Love if anyone has a quick fix for my share counts. And seriously. Double rainbow.]
