the purge is on

Avoir is one of the first verbs you learn in French class. How ironic that 'to have' is taught before 'to be'. My very recent spirtual awakening (can I call it that) has taught me that simply being is the key to happiness. 'Having' leads to 'wanting' -- the desire to have more than you have and to thus never be happy with what you have. So here I am with more than I could ever want and all I really want to do is to hold on to my loved ones and torch all my belongings. I love this image: "And they packed up their belongings and fled". Only we'd need a 30' moving truck to cart all this crap behind us.

How did I get here? I used to love to shop and bring home new treasures. Today those very same treasures disgust me. They remind me of all the time and money I wasted accumulating unnecessary junk -- junk that I have to store, dust, repair and trip over on a daily basis. And when my house was bursting at the seams with all my crap, what did I do but buy a bigger house to store it. No more. The time has come to seriously purge.

I'm motivated more than ever to clean house. But here's the catch -- I don't like waste and I'm terribly nostalgic. I also have a dozen projects on the go and feel the need to hold on to their associated supplies.

Like most things I tackle, I need a plan. Here are the problem areas:

clothes - dropped 2 sizes thanks to some positive lifestyle changes; fat clothes, be gone!
books - cook books, university text books, lame self-help books, binders of ancient IT courses and software manuals ... be gone!
housewares - candles, vases, all sorts of useless entertaining crap to pitch; but what will we do if we start entertaining more? as if. Be gone!

k - I'll add more to this later. Time to start purging.