Downsizing

There is something liberating about packing up your life and designating your wordly goods as keepers, items to be stored or trash. I realize the "to be stored" pile is at least 75% the trash pile of the future. This collection consists of things I don't need for my immediate future, but someday might want to revisit. This includes fine china, baking pans for the most exotic goods, crystal and serving dishes. It will include beds and furniture items that won't fit into my future abode of one third the size of present. The "to be stored" items are in purgatory, waiting to see if they will be delivered to the promise land or banished to hell- let's say they have a temporary reprieve. The keeper pile is amazingly smaller than I ever thought it would be. After years of collecting cookbooks and reference tomes that I just couldn't be without, it turns out the internet is the world's largest cookbook collection and almost any recipe can be had there with hundreds of variations. But books aren't the only things I collected, there are boxes of holiday decorations, momentos of time spent in Iran, gifts presented and long forgotten and half finished projects of every ilk. So as the process of elimination continues, the trash heap grows, and I ponder as it stacks higher and higher, how I ever accomplished anything under the weight of such accumulation. Is it any wonder that I feel overwhelmed, top heavy and clumsy? Why do we humans do this to ourselves? In our distant past we (humankind) were hunters and gatherers, now we hunt in Nordstrom's and gather our trophies in our homes and put them on display. Everything must be magazine perfect, but it's all so temporary. One strong wind such as the economy is feeling right now and it's all gone, just dust in it's wake. Then we're left with only what we can carry and hold in our memories.