My dad was a packrat.
Whenever he would buy something, he would keep the box.
“Just in case.”
When I was a kid, we had no problem finding a box for any purpose.
If you’ve ever moved from one house to another, you may have been faced with the difficult question.
“Should I keep this or trash it?”
Especially if you are the one boxing everything up, putting it in the truck (or your friends’ cars) and then unloading it.
You look at it and think, “Wow, I’ve had this for years, but I forgot it. Do I really need to keep it?”
Of course, you still think that you might one day “need” that stuff.
A good rule of thumb is that if you haven’t used it in the past year, you can safely trash it.
Some even say you should do this once a year, even if you’re not moving. It can really give you a “fresh” feeling, even though you haven’t really done anything except throw a bunch of stuff in the garbage.
But even this is hard. You might have a favorite shirt, one you haven’t worn in YEARS.
But when you think about throwing it out, you might start to feel sad. Melancholy for the “good ‘ol days.”
Sure, there are extremes. There are people who shun ALL material possessions. They wander the earth in search of truth.
Then there are those people to keep EVERYTHING. They even make TV shows about them. How their entire houses are filled with all kinds of junk they don’t even know they have.
Human emotions are kind of like that. Our deep instincts.
They were formed when life was dangerous. When we had to chase our food, and other critters were chasing us because WE were food.
But it’s not like that any more.
Many of those fears and trepidations are like that old shirt you haven’t worn in a decade.
It might a bit painful to throw it in the trash, but once you do, you’ll feel a sense of lightness that will make EVERYTHING seem new.
And since you’ve got a whole CLOSETFULL of those old fears in your brain that you simply DO NOT NEED anymore, you can start throwing them out one by one.
And slowly replace them with better feelings and attitudes and beliefs. Just like you can replace that old disco shirt for one that’s much more stylish, and will get you much better attention.
Get Started: