If you look at something often enough, your perspective of it may very well change.

As the history books tell it, there came a time when people left behind their nomadic ways, and turned instead to raising crops and living in settled communities. This shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture and permanent housing meant humans could acquire more possessions. If you don’t have to carry around everything you own, or stash your valuables in multiple locations across your territory, you can own not just necessary items, but unnecessary items, as well⏤things created only for their beauty. Flash forward 12,000 years or so, and you likely own more than a handful of non-essential items, items that please the ear and the eye, but that are not necessary for survival: Artwork, jewelry, toys, decorations, and so on.

It’s almost universally accepted now that culling your possessions can have positive effects on your sense of well-being, but it’s impossible to do so without raising at least a little dust and at least a few emotions. Even the least sentimental person is attached to their things, and personal possessions have a way of holding memories. Liberate an item, and liberate a feeling, whether you want to or not. Probably the most difficult thing to part with are collections. The time, and energy, and love, and passion that go into curating a collection seems to cast a spell over the items. What as a single item would be easy to part with becomes much more challenging to get rid of when it is but a part of a greater whole. That single record album could easily be tossed in the thrift store pile. Those 300 albums? Not so much.

Consider the lowly penny. If you see one on the ground, you might pick it up, or you might just step over it. If someone flagged you down and offered you a penny, you would think they were crazy, and would be annoyed that they wasted your time. But what about a jar of pennies? What about 10 jars? What about a hundred jars, each filled with pre-1982 pennies valued at several cents each due to their almost entirely copper composition? Jars of pennies that took decades to collect.

Culling is so powerful because it forces you to ask hard questions about things you own, and what they represent to you. To keep the pennies is to hoard them, to choose the burden of their enormous weight, a decision based on a scarcity mindset. To get rid of the pennies is to literally unburden yourself, but to dump them in a coin machine is to give them away for less than they are worth. What is the right thing to do with the coins? Will keeping them block abundance from flowing to you? Will getting rid of them open you up to abundance? The very best part of a dilemma like this is that the only way to find out is to part with the coins, and see what happens. You may not be a hunter and a gatherer anymore, but owning hundreds of pounds of pennies may not be the intended fruit of civilization.

Copyright 2023 Kesel Wilson (entirely, 100% human-created)

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