I’m going to take a cue from Ken and approach the horse…

Angela and I are in the middle of doing a ton of paperwork and planning for our impending move to Portland. One of the things we’re currently shuffling is figuring out what we’re going to take with us and what we’re going to get rid of.

Few things make you more present about how much stuff you have until you start thinking about moving it across the country. We’re using a service that allows us to pack our stuff into a container and they’ll deliver it when we’re ready, but we’re being charged per every additional foot we’re using in the container.

It’s fascinating, really: when presented with the option of having to pay to keep it – because keeping it means we’ll have to pay to transport it – we’re reexamining how much value we’re getting out of stuff that we’d normally keep out of inertia. In just one day, we’ve decided to sell a bed, a couch and loveseat, patio furniture, exercise equipment, and a few other smaller items that weren’t doing anything but collecting dust.

Apparently, it’s fine for it to collect dust, but we’ll be damned if we’ll pay for it to collect dust. It’s gotta go.

The fascinating bit is that we’ve been paying for this stuff to collect dust all along, but we haven’t thought of it that way. We’ve moved it, cleaned it, stumbled over it, set it up, broken it down, thought about where to put it, stored it, and so on. Only upon having to pay for it have we reassessed that we don’t want it in the first place.

What’s true of this physical stuff is true of a lot of other Stuff. Because we’ve become comfortable with certain beliefs and perspectives, we lug them around with us. We have Money Stuck, so we hide from looking at the numbers, and we don’t change it until the costs of lugging the Money Stuck around becomes too great to bear. We have fears of rejection, so we build comfortable walls around ourselves until those wall uncomfortably strain our growth and then we decide to let those fears go. I could go on, but these are just canoes that we need to leave behind.

So, taking a holistic view of your life right now, what would you keep if you had to pay to keep it? You don’t have to be moving across the country to let it go.