Shedding the past
I’ve been a packrat my whole life, but apparently I want to move to Costa Rica way more than I want my Stuff. Like a stash of old t-shirts - at some point, they were all so precious to me that I couldn’t part with them. A Catholic grammar school t-shirt and a high school sweatshirt - gone. (or rather, sent to Goodwill) And the concert t’s - echoes of a past me. T-shirts from Van Halen (age 14), Tesla (20-ish) and KMFDM (22-ish) - all gone.
Shedding stuff became a lot easier when I learned about the Pareto principle - aka the 80-20 rule. Generally, 20% of something results in 80% of something else. For businesses, the rule of thumb is that 20% of your customers result in 80% of your business. After reading The Four Hour Workweek, I immediately applied it to my wardrobe. I had 3-4 favorite pants & 3-4 favorite shirts I’d wear at any given time. The majority of everything else was rarely touched and I got rid of roughly 75% of my clothes. (I just did another round and ditched another 20%.)
Letting go of that made it easier to get rid of stuff around the house. And it really was letting go. Letting go of the past, of the life I thought I wanted. At the last meeting of our unschooling tribe I finally managed to articulate it - it was clinging to the stuff that I knew, at a time when I was almost rudderless in life. (For peeps in Pennsylvania, it’s guns & religion - for me, it’s a load of crap :-P) Now the focus on what I want my life to be is distinct, and I can shed all the stuff from times past.
