Urgin' For A Purgin'

Monday December 14th, 2009 - Lake Villa, IL

It’s amazing how people make the same mistakes over and over again. I’m an especially guilty party and it frustrates me to no end. It hit me as I was rifling through all my piles of everything today that I really don’t need to own most of the physical possessions that I do.

It’s all a big waste of money, time, space and energy. Other than that, it’s fine. I have an overload of books and audio programs on both CD and cassette, a bunch of totally useless ‘collectibles’, not including the mother lode of sports cards I never should have bought.

I’ve known this for a long time, but I still keep buying stuff anyway. Why do I do that? I always tell myself it’s a good deal, and maybe that means the price was low, but if I don’t ever get around to using it how good of a deal was it? I think I need to do a major purge.

I’ve done that several times in my life and every time I do it the process gets easier. It’s easy to accumulate useless possessions but that first time I got rid of all of them it was an unbelievably difficult task. I didn’t want to let go at first, but when I finally did I loved it.

That was very productive and cleansing too, but then I allowed myself to let it build up all over again, in even higher piles than there were before I got rid of it. Then, I’d cleanse again and it felt good again…and then I’d let it build up again. Guess what? I did it again.

I love books and I love to read, just as I love to listen to audio programs when I drive on road trips. That’s fine, but there’s no way I’ll ever get to even half the stuff I have now if I live to be 200 and read eight hours a day, seven days a week. Enough already. I’m full up.

In theory, I’d love to be able to read all those books from cover to cover and listen to all the Wayne Dyer and Tony Robbins and so many others I’ve never even heard yet and just soak in all that valuable information so I can use it to make my life better in every way.

In reality, I spent a bunch of money I could really use right now for other things on stuff that’s just sitting around collecting dust and could easily be wiped out with a flood or fire, leaving me not only with nothing to show for my investment, but a mess to clean up also.

I looked up and down my book shelves today and saw book after book that I just had to have that I never even opened since I bought it. Some I bought new, others I found in old book stores or thrift shops or rummage sales. If I haven’t read them, why do I keep them?

I guess I think I’ll lose money on selling them back to a bookstore, but I already lost the money when I bought them in the first place. If I didn’t read them by now, that money is a distant memory. Anything I can manage to scrape up now is a bonus and I should take it.

The cards won’t be so easy. I blew a wad on those, and the fun wasn’t worth the money. I thought I could turn a buck on them but the market is in the toilet right now as it is for a lot of collectibles. I learned my lesson, but I already knew it. It’s time to clean it all out.