- The 150 magazines in storage.
- The clothes we haven’t worn in years but still, think we might need.
- The ski boots we wore in college but keep around for nostalgia.
- The relationships with people who’ve long outgrown their value to our lives.
- The 18,000 emails in our inbox.
- The resentment of someone who wronged us in the past and never apologized.
We’re all completely fooling ourselves.
We’re not actually going to benefit from these things being around. We’re not going to be able to use them “better” down the road.
They’re just holding us back from embracing future opportunities. They’re allowing us to hold onto the past, but the past is dead and not coming back, despite the fact we wish it would.
It’s only by letting go of things from our past, that we can truly be lighter and less burdened and move forward into the future with open arms. Because all these little things we’re holding onto are taking up space and blocking new things from coming into our lives. There’s no room from them, so they move on and pick someone else.
We sit there wondering why new things won’t come into our lives. It’s simple: we haven’t made space for them.
So, grab whatever you haven’t used in the last year, and throw them the hell away. Or give it to charity. It will do someone else more good then it will you.
As Marie Kondo who preaches “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” says, keep only the things that spark pure joy for us, then take the rest, thank them for their time, and like a romantic partner we’re no longer compatible with, let them go and wish them the best. It’s hard to accept the things we want to hold dear are now dead to us, but it’s essential that we face it, admit it, and try to be ok with it.
We think we’ll be losing something special, a sacred part of our past, but what we can’t see is what we’re about to miss out on because we’re not open to receiving whatever new adventure is coming our way.
This is true of romantic partners, jobs, homes, friends, clothes, even points of view. Throw out old software and welcome in the new.
The sooner we disentangle ourselves from the cobwebs of the past, the sooner we’ll be able to welcome in the life that’s waiting for us to make room.
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