Sunday Story...The Urge to Purge

Sunday Story…The Urge to Purge

About 3 years ago I “down-sized” my life. I moved into a house 1/3rd smaller than the one I was living in. A 1 one car instead of 2, one bedroom less, everything was smaller. I even lost so much stuff I could put the car in the garage (what a concept)! But lately I have been feeling stuck and cramped and just generally weighted down.

When I look around my world today I see a lot of stuff. I seem to have spent a lot of time (and money) acquiring stuff. Some of this stuff is left over from things I used to do. Clothes, food, books, cds, knick knacks and bric a brac are all there.

I have one cupboard in my kitchen filled with food I will no longer eat. Rice, flour, prepared and boxed stuff, loose stuff, it’s all in there. Yet for some time I have resisted getting rid of it. Honestly a great portion of it is probably waaaay past its expiration date. I will never eat any of it. It’s perfectly good but for some reason I have resisted cleaning out that cupboard. Maybe I am thinking of the day the world crashes down and I will need some weird Thai box food to eat? I have friends who would eat this food. I could give it to one of the food pantries. So what is the stop?

Although my closet today is smaller than the one I had 3 years ago, I do have 2 closets full of clothes. And some of those clothes are still bagged up from the move, so I have not worn them in 3+ years! Again I have friends who would wear some of these things. There are shelters that would take them. There is probably a clothing exchange somewhere that would take them. I could sell them. The fact is that many of them don’t fit anymore, others are a style I don’t wear anymore, and others may never have been right but they looked cool and the price was right. So what is the stop?

My garage is the place where all the orphan stuff goes to live. There are 3 boxes of empty mineral water bottles. I saved them because they need to be recycled somewhere and in California they have an actual cash value. There is an old stereo system that is probably 20 years old including a turntable with no needle and a cassette player…yes a cassette player. And somewhere there is probably a box of cassette tapes which haven’t been played in 10+ years. All of it needs to be gone through and trashed, sold, recycled, given up, or burnt. So what is the stop?

Obviously I have the urge to purge yet I don’t. When I look around I feel stifled and stuck. It is almost like being in a closed up room with no air flow in the summer time---really uncomfortable and hard to breathe. The answer is…just do it.

Just throw it out.
Just give it away.
Just recycle it.
Just burn it.
Just get rid of it somehow, someway.
We all know the answer yet we don’t do it.
We all know the lightness that will come when we unburden our life from these things.
We all know that by getting rid of the old we make room for the new…the new experiences, the new, possibilities, the new people that can come into our lives when we make room.
We all know that purging our junk is good for us once in a while.

Yet it is so hard to do. The task is daunting. When I look at that cupboard I cringe. Yet I know in my head that it will take less than an half an hour to clean up. So what is the stop?

The clothes feel worse. It feels like I have to decide that I am never going to wear that again. That I will never be that size again. That the style no longer suits me. Then when we add in the memories of the clothes…where they were last worn, who bought them, the compliments received while wearing them, it feels as if I would be giving away those memories as well.

Then there is the garage. And that feels just impossible. A huge task. And I am not talking about the work; I am talking about putting the memories away. Taking books I have been carrying around for 40 years and doing something with them. It just goes against my training. On the other hand I haven’t even looked at them in over 3 years, let alone read them. They have been sitting in boxes all that time. The same thing goes for cds…I have hundreds yet today I keep all my music on various hard drives and I wouldn’t have room in the house for the 500 gigs or so of music I keep on those drives. Yet there they are in boxes all over the garage.

The stop is not wanting to deal with the memories of all that stuff. If I keep it all locked away I don’t have to deal with it. I don’t have to sort and sift through the experiences and the good and the bad that all that stuff represents.

We all have stuff. We all have more stuff than we really need. I know I do. And I know I am going to get the stop off and get rid of the stuff that no longer serves me. This stuff is holding me back from what I really want, from the things that will really serve me in my life as it is right now.

Anyone want any of this stuff?


Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
www.martialartsnevada.com

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