My mom, sister and I have a garage sale every April. Usually it’s around my birthday (April 28th) and we have cake and ice cream. My aunts and my mom’s neighbors come over and we eat, talk, laugh and sell stuff. It’s so much fun.
This year my husband and I want to buy a house. Some of the houses we looked at don’t have finished basements. The house we currently rent has a finished basement and we have a futon, two end tables, a tv stand, tv, dvd player, a coffee table, and a lot of other stuff downstairs. My step daughter and her cousins used to play and watch movies in the basement, but now that they are older and have jobs the basement hasn’t been used in years.
We decided to downsize and put all of the unused furniture in the sale.
This lead me to think of other areas in my life I need to downsize which lead me to ask the following question:
What am I going to need to keep for the 2nd half of my life? What items nourish my soul? What items show my real self? What items do I LOVE and have to keep?
These questions go thru my head as I go thru every drawer, cabinet and box in my house.
I realized I’ve been hanging onto stuff because I think I may need it someday. For example: I have this Walkman in the top drawer of my nightstand. I’ve had it forever, but rarely use it. I want to use it. I have tried to listen to motivational CD’s before I go to bed, but I always fall asleep and never finish the CD.
So why do I keep it? Because for some reason it pulls at my heart strings because what if I want to listen to the CD in the future and I have nothing to play it on. I know this is a really goofy reason to keep something. I have a CD player in my truck so if I need to listen to it I can do it while I’m driving.
I marked it yesterday and put it the garage sale bin.
Why are we so afraid to let things go? Why do we hang on (sometimes very tightly) to stuff we don’t need, use or want.
I think as we head into the 2nd half of our lives we need to figure out what we need of our current possessions and let the rest go. Only keep what makes your hear sing.
I can’t keep stuff because I am afraid to let it go. I have to let the item go and release the fear and move on.
It will be hard this year to watch all of my stuff go. My hope is that the people that buy my stuff will need it and like it as much as I do.
All of the money we make will be going toward whatever we need for the new house…paint, wall decorations, etc.
Out with the old and in with the new!
Chrissy's Fab 50's 