Wanting Everything You Have

So yesterday I wrote about having everything you want, and said that buying lots of new things really isn't a problem for me.

Then I promptly went to Target and bought a dozen things from their clearance racks.

Seriously, I got some darn good buys on some clothes and shoes for me and Kat for next summer and picked up a couple of gifts to give to Kat for Christmas.

I had to find a place to store those things, though. That's the drawback to having stuff. You have to store it. Dust it. You have to take care of it in general.

Too much stuff will bog you down. It will keep you from moving freely around your home, it will get in your way when you try to clean your home, and it could cause you to trip and fall. It will eventually cost you money, because it will keep you from finding the scissors, the remote, or your kids' shoes so many times that you'll go out and buy new ones. If it's a plant or a pet, it will cost you money to keep it healthy.

We have stuff. Do we ever! Because we run a bit of a resale operation from our home, we have stuff. Because Shane is able to bring usable building materials home from job sites, we have stuff. Because we have a 4-year-old in the house, we have stuff.

Of course, if it's mine, it's good stuff that we need to keep. If it's anyone else's, it's just junk.

All joking aside, we do have a ton of things that we will either sell or use for home improvements. Most of that is stored in our basement. Because I don't want all the things we have, I've been working hard at keeping "stuff" to a minimum inside our living areas.

I think sometimes, for me at least, it's a matter of not realizing how quickly things seem to multiply. I recently converted my CDs to MP3 files and realized I had more than 300 CDs in all. I put a very large basket in our bedroom a few months ago and put three or four books I'd like to read in it. Now it's overflowing. A couple of weeks ago, I went through a drawer and a box of things that at one time I was certain I'd never part with: special books, mementos, etc. After considering each item carefully, I realized that I'd outgrown most of the sentimental reasons I was keeping them and was able to get rid of most of them by donating them or throwing them out.

I still have a lot of decluttering to do, but it will get done, and my life will be simpler for it.

Now what about the intangibles that a person no longer want? Bad relationships, poor health, personality traits or habits that are keeping you from being who you really want to be. Those kinds of things are a lot harder to identify and sometimes even harder to purge.

One area I'd like to work on is being less meticulous about some things and maybe more meticulous about others. I feel, sometimes, that maybe my focus is in the wrong place and if I could level things out a little. I'd have more time to just sit back and relax.

In fact, I'd like to purge my inability to relax. I have a hard time just sitting down to read, watch a movie or play with Kat because I constant think I need to be up taking care of some chore or at least, multitasking while I sit in front of the TV. Other than the moments I'm on the computer during the day, I'm on the go from the time I get up around 5:30 in the morning until I finally sit down for the evening around 8:30. The same holds true for Shane. We're back in bed around 10:00, so that doesn't give us much time to relax. I'd love to be the type of person who gets up and leisurely reads the paper and enjoys her coffee while sitting on the patio. But until I purge some control issues, I won't be able to.

So what about you? Do you have everything you want? More importantly, do you want all that you already have? If you have ideas for making your life simpler, please share.