Less is more

Several years ago, we decided that we wanted to scale back and decrease the number of things we owned. They were beginning to own us; taking care of them took more time than we had to enjoy them. Books were an early casualty; we had so many, and all we did with them was dust them. Off they went, a box at a time, donated to the library. We only kept the ones we truly used for reference, or which were out of print and unlikely to pop up at the library.

That opened up so much space and time; we culled out the decorative items next. We only kept the things that truly made us happy; we decided that if taking care of something wasn't worth the enjoyment of it, out it went. Sure, there was guilt, at first, but the more we let go, the better we felt. Taking care of all of those things was weight we were glad to lose.

When we moved cross country, we did one more round. Everything now had a monetary weight to overcome; it wasn't enough to like it, we had to be willing to invest another dollar a pound in it in order to keep it. It was amazing how many things were just not worth it to us.

But now we're going after even bigger guns. We're talking about eliminating television reception from our lives. It's gotten dreadfully expensive, and the programming is not very good. We don't really enjoy it; we just fall into it because it's there, and we're tired or in a lazy mood. We're still discussing it; we haven't pulled the plug on it yet. We're not talking about eliminating the set; we'll probably rent movies when we want to watch, and maybe we'll even use the Wii more often.

I have to admit, I'm looking forward to losing it. With what it costs, we could eat out twice a week!