Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [98]
Let whatever feeds your soul serve its natural purpose, even if that purpose doesn't seem terribly grand or traditional to others.
Keep finding yourself
Ask yourself:
What do I love?
With whom do I want to share my time?
When do I feel most myself?
How can I pare what surrounds me down to that which is right in this moment?
What matters to me now?
Why am I doing anything that doesn't bring me closer to this?
This doesn’t mean that everything you do is always fun, but it should serve your goals. Think about your constants. What's been part of your life for 10 years? 20? Longer? How do those things relate to your priorities?
Writing journals is a great way to identify and observe our answers to these questions, and analyze how they change over time. Writer Barbara Ueland praised the value of keeping a free-flowing diary: “It has shown me more and more what I am—what to discard in myself and what to respect and love.”
Embrace the knowledge that the shelf life of all plans is limited. The payoff of regularly reviewing your plans is realignment with current reality and goals.
Dream duty
When we re-examine our belongings after self-reflection, we begin to see how letting go is deeply intertwined with being honest with ourselves. Our stuff comes to represent us; comes to be a physical manifestation of our worth as a person. Perhaps worse, it comes to represent the self we dream of being but into which we haven’t yet made ourselves.
I call this “dream duty.” You might say, “If I don’t get rid of this guitar/skateboard/ ballroom dress, I will eventually get around to using it proficiently, even though I don’t practice.” Folks, ya gotta fish or cut bait. Start making time to work on that dream or let it go. If you want to fit into those pants again, eat less and exercise, or get a pair like them in your current size.
How do you decide whether to keep the dream or its associated objects in your life? Rather than trying to decide about a particular object, come at it from the other angle: What are your dreams now?
Take some time, give yourself permission to imagine anything, and see where your heart leads you. Decide what really matters to you, where you really want to be heading, and then look again at the dream-duty objects taking up space in your home. If those things aren’t part of your top goals, get them out of your way.
Again, as with souvenirs, acknowledge who you were when you dreamed those dreams and allow yourself to be someone different now. Sometimes you’ll find that your dreams have changed, and that’s the easier situation to deal with. The hard one is when you still have the dream but it just doesn’t seem realistic. You may still want to be a ballerina but, if you’re about to celebrate your 40th birthday, you will probably have to figure out what part of that dream held the most appeal and how you can get that without having to trade yourself in for a body 20 or 30 years younger.
What about your dreams is pointing the way to your happiness? Focus on the next step toward your goal rather than the accessories to your initial fantasies of that dream life. If you do this, you’ll be moving in the right direction.
Just as acquisition doesn’t intrinsically solve problems or improve your life, the props you associate with your dreams don’t intrinsically make them come true.
Send away the stale surroundings
Look at the things you've had in front of you for so long that you've stopped seeing them. Do they still match who you are? It's okay to be done with them. Is the artwork on your walls still what you want to see every day?