Andrew's View of the Week

Nothing special here.  Just life going on and world spinning on its endless path.  I wish I had some great insight or world shaking wisdom to impart.  I don’t. 

This week we got a new shed and set about refilling it.  We had an old metal shed, but the roof was starting to rust and I was worried that it would start leaking.  Heather and I decided to buy a new shed to replace it.  So last weekend we moved all the stuff out of the old shed and during the week the shed company came out to install our new shed.

Yesterday it was time to put the stuff back into the shed.  The first step was to take a look at what we were storing and sort it out.  Not everything was going back into the shed.  Each of us had boxes of stuff that we’d stored away thinking we’d need it again.  I had boxes of books, papers and other items. 

Before I started I thought I’d have a difficult time deciding what to keep.

It wasn’t hard.  They were just things.  Each box I opened I asked two questions, “Would I ever use it again?” and “Would I ever miss it?”

I have to admit that most of the stuff I had, fell in to the category of, “I still have this crap?”

Every item in the shed was sorted into four groups: keeping, donating, recycling or trash.

Both the trash and recycle bins are full.  The donation pile is ready to drive to the thrift store and I think we only put back in the shed a little over half of what we took out.  Things we kept were mostly seasonal storage like the outdoor Christmas lights, summer fans, and our new A/C unit.  There were a couple of boxes of my parent’s things that I’ll deal with another day and a box of my school papers that I don’t want to part with yet.  Heather had a box of picture frames she kept, and nice twin bed that we don’t have use at the moment, but it’s too nice to just get rid of.

In the end, it’s just things.  If we lost all of them, we’d still be us, we’d still have our memories.  It’s a luxury to have a space to hold all the things of our life – things that trigger happy memories and our shed does hold a few of those.  Having lots of things is nice, but doesn’t always lead to happiness.  Sometimes things just get in the way and getting rid of them is sometimes liberating.

But we did decide to keep the beach buckets and sand shovels.  The kids haven’t used them in years, but Heather and I agreed that we need to go to the beach and build a sandcastle or two.

Till next time,

Andrew