The Release Of Objects Accumulated In Life

In order to live our best life, at least one area we need to develop is the mindset of examining what we currently have in our life and how those things fit into our goals.  We did this with our chicken flock.  We learned that it was not going to be in our best interest.

We did the chicken farm thing, and it was successful.  We had so many eggs that we couldn’t keep up with the production.  Over time, we were overrun with eggs.  With the birds doing well with “Free Ranging” we did begin to run into troubles when the birds attracted predators that began to kill our flock.  In doing what’s best, we decided to reassess our operation.  It was at that point we decided that to re-home our diminishing flock.  This wasn’t about quitting but realigning our priorities to “live our best life”.

See, having chickens was not a bad choice nor was letting them go.  We realized that we could in fact raise them and have more than enough eggs.  What we didn’t fully consider was the care taking required would mean we had to figure out ways to ensure the birds were taken care of daily. 

The care requirements meant we couldn’t travel very far or long.  At the time of the Covid crisis, it wasn’t much of an issue.  We eventually learned that while there was a certain satisfaction in being able to raise your own food source, it comes at a higher cost than appeared on the surface. 

Since we wanted to travel or just be able to take a real vacation here and there, we had to assess what we were doing to make that happen.  We also had to assess what was preventing it.  Since we didn’t want to do the full-on farming thing where we raise our own crops and animals, we decided that relying on the market and economy for our food sources is in our best interests.  This frees us up to travel and take those longer trips away from home.  It reduces the table space we lost to the mountains of eggs we couldn’t consume and the stresses of what to do with them as they went bad.  Yes, that happened, and the frustrating part is that we couldn’t even give them away fast enough….and we tried.

Back to the “Living our best life thoughts”.  We are still working out what this means and it’s not something that happens overnight.  What we do know is that being tied down to our home with a reduced ability to explore is not for us.  We also know that we need to have a place to call home and retreat to.  This should be a place where we can come to without having to feel like as soon as we arrive, we need to do a mountain of work to “get the place back in order”.  Worst case, it’s a little bit of lawn mowing and simple things a normal home needs. 

Inside and outside of our home, we want clean spaces that aren’t cluttered and don’t have things in them that do not have a purpose.  A picture on the wall for example has a purpose of decorating the wall but that same picture on the floor that hasn’t been hung up and we continue to have to step over it or move is clutter and should be hung or stored.  On storing, it’s important to determine if what we store is truly important to us.  We cannot store should not be stored in order to decide what to do with it later.  Doing that is to defer decisions and it is how a home becomes cluttered.  Piles of deferred decisions can build up rather quickly.  It’s also important to not just throw out everything because we don’t want to have to face having to decide.

How to tackle the deferred decisions.  It’s challenging to just walk into a room or space and just start sorting what needs to go where.  Researching ways to make this easier have yielded many ideas and the following is one that seems to have merit.  I’m sure there are others. 

Using Categories to sort. – By looking at our lives, we can categorize the things we find important as well as those things that are just required daily living things.  Once we figure out what categories are important, we can then begin to move throughout our environment and begin to sort and store, release or dispose of. 

When looking at any object from any category, we can assess it and ask a few questions to determine how we direct it.  1.  Does the object bring us joy? 2.  Does still it have a purpose in our life.  3.  Does the object have value.  Once it has passed the questioning it can then be determined what/where to place it.  Sometimes it’s going to be stored.  For example, a box of family photos that brings us joy when we look at them.  A wine rack full of delightful wines, could get a yes to all three questions.  A giant meat slicer in the kitchen might get a “yes” to the question of value but a “no” to the others.  Sorting an object such as giant meat slicer is relatively easy.  Its giant size did anything but bring joy as it was incredibly large.  Its purpose had been reduced due to the sheer size of the unit.  It was not useful enough to use and then have to clean it each time.  It’s more practical to just purchase our meats pre-sliced.  This answers the purpose question with a “no”.  It does have value, so the answer was to release the object by selling it.  Which we did. 

Some thoughts about the release of an object.  Sometimes there will be a point where all three questions are answered with a “no” and it is at that point we have to recognize something called “Sunken Cost”.  This is where the object has been deemed as having served a purpose but no longer does, it also does not bring joy and has no value.  An object with this sorting applied to it can be difficult to release because it can be hard to let go of something that we have spent money for, and we do not see a way to recover the “sunken cost”.  We must recognize that hanging onto such an object is not good for us as these items only serve to weigh us down because if we decide to keep them, we are then forced to manage these objects that have no reason to be in our lives.

How do we let go?  There are several thoughts on how that can be done.  One such way is intriguing and seems to make some sense.  A little strange but effective.  When you get to the point you have determined that the object must be released, you can release the object after you “thank” it for being useful and realizing its purpose in your life has been fulfilled.  You then release it by giving it away or disposing of it.  I did say it was a bit strange.  Rather than “thanking” the object, you could simply look at it and acknowledge it has reached “the end” of its time in your life.

I have been letting go of such things as of late and I can say for sure that after a while, you realize it’s quite freeing.  This reduction of objects that do not get at least one answer of yes for the three questions will help us live our best lives.  We are reducing the task of managing them when they only serve to consume our lives, our space and our resources when we let them go.

Are you on the path to living your best life?