Collect Moments Not Things

"It is only when you cease doing what you are programmed to do that you find what you were meant to do." - Pico Iyer

Stages of life are often reflected in the stuff one collects. In childhood, dolls, crayons, and birthday party favors fill your drawers and accumulate in baskets and bins. As a teenager, trophies and certificates and concert ticket stubs and photographs create collages on your bulletin board until you move away to college. In college, you begin to collect friends and experiences, but your stuff must somehow fit into shared dorm rooms...less becomes more. As a young adult entering the workforce, one collects useful things for daily life...like coffee pots and dishes, a lamp, bed and decor to create a home or at least a place to be when not working or socializing. Marriage formalizes the collecting process. Gift registries and generous friends and families fill your new shared home with things, most of which you will rarely use in real married life, like rice cookers and fondue pots and sets of china and crystal, which you will carefully pack and relocate whenever your career dictates another move. With each passing year, your collections grow, until you one day realize that you have more coffee makers than coffee drinkers in your home. Then, if you start a family, you beget the next generation of collectors. Plastic invades your home. Legos, happy meal toys, educational toys...soon you will buy plastic bins to contain the plastic clutter. And more plastic bins will be needed to collect and archive the paperwork and produced work of childhood - the parental shrine to achievement. From finger painting to SAT scores, parents save it all to document the evolution from baby to teenager.

And in a blink, your children are grown and you must make a choice. Should I and will I continue to provide the repository for the physical reminders of memories shared or shall I bless and release the stuff? I chose to keep the memories and provide the means, both time and money, to create new shared memories through travel together.

I chose to bless and release. And so my purging begins. One box at a time, one shelf at a time, one book at a time. Actually, after moving the same unread and reread books from home to home, I decide to start with the books. And so I ceased collecting things and began collecting moments.