Trash

A friend of mine has made a vow (to his wife) that for every new toy brought into his home, another old one must go.

This is a hard idea to swallow, and it will definitely stick in your throat if you have an addiction, say, to shopping and costuming yourself.

Making an effort to hold back buying new stuff is never easy; chucking your old collections of textbooks and lecture notes, directories, shoes, toys, comic books, jewelry (or fill in whatever worthy of your collection here) is even more difficult. Fear of needing them someday and worth of fortune in the future, habit, and nostalgia... There are thousands of reasons for our penchant to fill our homes to the brim. We keep everything lest we throw the baby out with the bath water. Yet, I learned a lesson during my recent Herculean task of cleaning my home. Over last few weeks, I learned to enjoy the tidying process. As it turned out, there were dozens of computer floppy diskettes that I will never open again, bunches of keys that I am unable to find out what to open with, not to mention load of books that are outdated.

Believe me, you can never imagine how many of your collections should have gone to the trash. We simply amass astonishing amount of stuff without setting aside time to send away those unnecessary and useless stuff. And of course, it would also hold true if you spell the word "stuff" in my previous sentence the other way, replacing the alphabet of u by a.