I have stuff. Sometimes, like when I moved, I feel like I have too much stuff. And by some people’s standards, I may have too much stuff. I know I have a lot of stuff. I discover it most when I have something new that I have obtained, for one reason or another, and I attempt to find a place to put it.
So yes, there is a solution to the problem of stuff.Get rid of it. That’s all well and good. I don’t think there are a lot of us that can just walk into a room of their stuff and just say ‘Get rid of it all.’ This is evidenced by watching people on the tv show ‘Clean House’. There are some people that just can’t let go. We may think that they are just being childish or whatever. We think they should just let it go. We don’t usually think that if that were our item that we had had for so long that maybe we would have trouble giving it up too. Even when getting rid of an obviously delapidated chair and being promised a new one there is hesitation.
I understand why sometimes. In the case of the chair. Maybe the person took a long time looking to find a chair that fit just right, was the right size and height, (I have this problem. I’m short and many chairs are just a little too tall for my complete comfort.). Perhaps they have had the home for a very long time and for half that time they had no furniture in the living room. Finally they found furniture that they could use. It may not be good stuff, it may be dirty or any number of other issues. But they finally have furniture.
There are reasons it’s hard to get rid of stuff. Unfortunately, it doesn’t just apply to big items like furniture. It applies to little things. Things like comic books for that collection you had as a kid or that, now that you are older, you think you are going to start and you haven’t touched them in 10 or 15 years nor have you added to the collection. Things like electronics that you think you are going to tinker with and yet you never have the time or when you do have the time, you do other things. Things like the books you were going to read and have started and they just were dog boring or you’ve lost interest in the subject. Hobby supplies for the hobby that you never got started. Hobby supplies for the hobby that you actually do and think you are going to expand into another area of it.
Yes, these things can often also be hard to let go of. We think how we might go ahead and work on that collection. Spend more time on that hobby. Or, oh wait, that book does sound good. Sometimes I think we’re afraid of regret and moving on. We don’t want to, one day, regret we got rid of something (like those Sonny and Cher records that probably rocketed in price after Sonny died). And we’re afraid that if we give up on that comic collection and move on that it means we’ve grown up and can never have fun again.
Now I can’t speak for the whole world. Maybe other cultures put less significance into stuff. Maybe for them it isn’t tied so much to their self worth. Here, with the advertisers and culture, it seems that our self worth is very much tied to how much stuff you have and how up to date that stuff is. As a result there is the booming business of self storage facilities. Used to, where they existed, there weren’t a lot of them. Now, in one area of town, when I lived there, within just a few miles of each other there were at least 3 new self storage businesses open within a year.
So, I have a lot of stuff, in my oppinion, and for the size of my home. Oh, it’s not over flowing, I try to keep it under control. However, I have started thinking that it might be time to start letting go of more things that are unusable, I’m never really going to do anything with, and I don’t really need.
And now we come to the other reason we don’t get rid of stuff. It’s going to take some time and it may be tedious. As examples: I have some paints that I can probably get rid of as they are probably all hard and unusable, that means I have to go through them all. Then there’s that old computer that I have that has files on it I may need or want. I have to set it up, attach something to it to backup those file and then I have to go through them to see what it is I want and what I no long need. Both of these things are time consuming and unexciting.
Guess I had better get started on this. It may take a while. Wish me luck.
Cheers.
Originally published at: suguayproductions.com/joomla which has been discontinued.
