The last Blog in this series was about deciding what you can’t do without, and getting rid of everything else.  Well, maybe.  In some senses it was really about deciding that it’s okay to eliminate stuff from your life that no longer serves you in a positive way.  I stepped around it a bit, but ultimately came down to getting rid of people from your day to day life who either (a) are destructive to you, or (b) are not contributing in a positive way to the quality of your life.

I know that lots of people blog on the subject of toxic relationships, and its good to take advice that reduces unnecessary pain and sorrow.  What about people who are merely indifferent or who make no contribution.  Not toxic necessarily, but of complete indifference.  Be brave, get rid of them from your life too.  You won’t miss them a bit, and their absence might make room for you to add something or someone to your life that actually makes it better.

So that’s probably enough on that issue for now.  Be careful that you don’t welcome stuff back into your life once you’ve got rid of it.

It’s a little bit like my problem with books.  I always seem to keep everything I’ve read for the past ten years or so.  I so envy people with empty shelf space on their one book case.  I just don’t know how they can do it, really.  About twenty years ago I screwed up my courage to the sticking point and threw away about 10,000 books that were clogging up space on shelves that lined all the walls of my very large family room and several other rooms in the house.

Even after getting rid of all those books I still retained a couple of thousand books that I couldn’t bear to let go.  And lest you think I’m exaggerating when I say 10,000 I know there were that many because my kids at the time counted them, and gave up counting after reaching 10,000.  They weren’t all just my books, I’ll admit, I’d inherited a substantial library from my mom, who had kept a lot of books from her dad.  So not only did I inherit a lot of books, I also inherited their bad habit of being unable to rid myself of them once they no longer were likely to be read again, either by me or one of my family members.

However, that was more than 10 years ago, and I’ve accumulated numerous book cases full of books and magazines again, many of which I’ve read and won’t reread.  I still find it hard to let go of books and magazines, especially if enjoyed reading them enough to think that I might want to read them again.

So, taking my own advice I’m going to clean out a bunch of books that I really don’t think I’ll read again.  Don’t like doing it, but don’t like not doing it either.  So wish me luck over the next few days and weeks while I get to it.

Anybody need a few books?