Scribe for the Tribe - Mindful Living

I ran my first marathon yesterday.  I’m not particularly proud of the time I ran it in…they basically closed the course about fifteen minutes after I finished.  However I am proud that I stuck with it through all the pain.  Whether I decide to do it again next year, here are some lessons that I will take with me, regardless.

1. Know where you’re going – Okay, they give you maps for a reason.  Most people don’t carry them.  I did, but it would have been better had I studied the lay of the land prior to the race, maybe even drive or bike the course first.  There are so many twists and turns through city streets in the Buffalo Marathon.  I had to stop numerous times to figure out where to turn next.  It’s tough to hit your goal when you have no idea how to get there.   
2. Preparation meets opportunity – I failed in my training.  I did not follow a training plan and I never did my longer runs in training.  The most I topped out in during training was fifteen miles.  The result of this, and the first lesson is that I got separated from the pack and ran a very lonely race.
3. Run your own race – don’t get caught keeping up with people.  Chances are they will either burn themselves out too, or they are just in a lot better shape that you.  Take your time and do it your way.
4. Don’t take too much time – whether you are walking or running, the overall wear and tear is compounded the longer you are out there.  I was out there for more than five and a half hours…never again…next year I would hope to shave at least an hour off the time.
5. It’s a long walk home if you quit – That’s what I kept telling myself during the last ten miles of the race.  I would have to walk the ten miles back to my car anyway so I might as well finish.
6. Finally, thank God and thank your race volunteers – Neither necessarily have to be there for you during your race, but both choose to.  Have gratitude that you are physically able to run a race, that you live in a country where it is safe to do so, that people are friendly and are watching out for you etc.

I spent much of my weekend categorizing things. This is part of the Declutter bible-thumping that I have lately become a convert to. It is also the reason why I have not written a post in a few days…been too busy dealing with my clutter.

It’s my goal to completely simplify in 2008, so that I can better concentrate on the things that really matter in my life…family, writing (including music) and my health. And so I am a little depressed as I am sitting here typing this. I thought I had come a long way in my simplifying efforts but just tallying up the stuff I still have shows that I have a long way to go.

My big clutter issues are with clothing (as indicated in last post), books (oh, I so Love books) and CD’s. Admittedly, CD’s is an area that I have already dealt with on a clutter level. I used to have over 500 CD’s. I am down to half of that now. Books, too, I have made some strides in the last twelve months, going from approximately three hundred to 191.

But clothing is what I am depressed about right now. In all, I have 258 items of clothing. I live in a four-season climate, with extreme winters and summers, but it is still astonishing to me. I figured that I was at about half that previous to this exercise.

Now the question is, what to do to reconcile this? How do I deal with the feelings I am having about this?

The most important thing I have done so far as Catalog it. Now I have a concrete idea on how much I actually have. My starting point is solid. Now, I need to determine my goal with this. The goal needs to be Specific and Measurable. It also should be achievable and time-bound. My goal is to simplify my clothing by removing one hundred items. The date that I want to achieve this by is dependent upon which decluttering technique I choose.

1. 15 minutes a day for thirty days. This means spending fifteen minutes a day to move drawer by drawer, closet by closet, and pick up each item to decide whether it should stay or go.
2. Set a date of end of year – this allows me to slow purge, and to also use up some of what I have
3. 2 For 1 – This takes quite a bit longer, obviously, and you may want to do this in conjunction with another purging technique. For every item brought into the house, two must be removed.

I’m working on putting all three to work for the rest of 2008. I’ll go a bit further into this tomorrow as I am still putting together my plan. Hopefully the ideas will help some of you for now.

My father is a good man. Quiet, in most respects, and the lessons I learned from him were often through observation rather than through verbal communication. Just like animals do in the wild, I would watch and often try to imitate him in order to learn habits. Not all men are worthy to watch and learn from. My father is an impeccable example of one who is worthy. Some of his lessons took a lot longer for me to learn, due to my own stubbornness.

My father spent a few years in the military, like many people of his generation. He also grew up in a small household where he and three brothers at times shared a bedroom. I imagine it wasn’t tough for him to adjust when he had to share sleeping barracks with several other soldiers.

In both situations, I know, without even asking him, that he had to keep his modest possessions organized or there would be consequences to pay. In the Army, it would be cleaning the latrine, or doing pushups, or running laps. At home, the consequences were that his younger siblings would get into his “stuff” and claim it for there own, or worse, completely destroy it.

I was always surprised to see my father’s closet, when I was growing up. He typically had only three or four suits in there, two black, one brown, and one gray, all high end, all nicely tailored. He typically only wore white button down shirts to work, and he had an assortment of very nice ties. On weekends and the evenings it was always one or two pairs of khaki’s and a polo shirt. He had two pairs of shoes, a couple pairs of shorts, and a couple of baseball caps, and sneakers for yard-work, which has always been his passion. Never did I see the man in jeans or sweatpants. Never did I see him don a t-shirt. Beach-ware? Umm…khaki shorts again.

During his working years, he was a professional man, like myself, and when I spoke to his co-workers after his retirement, they all commented on what a nice dresser he was. The shirts were always perfectly starched, the shoes perfectly shined, and the suits always perfectly tailored.

Fast forward to me, and my first ten years in the professional world. I actually grew up and went to work in the same industry as my father, which has gone to a more relaxed dress code in recent years…business casual is the buzzword. My closet is so full of button-down shirts, forty by last count, and I still have some sitting in packages from the “sale of the season,” at one department store or another. I have every color imaginable in the spectrum. I have twelve pairs of slacks, eight pairs of shoes, eight pairs of flip flops…good God!. I haven’t even disclosed all the t-shirts and work-clothes I have. My wardrobe is an absolute mess. I spill over into three closets and two different dressers. My clothes are in three bedrooms, the attic, the basement, and I usually have something still sitting in my car. And if it wasn’t clear as to my gender previously, I am a male, and as such, my wardrobe should generally be simpler than my wife’s…it’s not.

So, two things here; one, of all the lessons learned from my father, why did this one take so long to sink in, and two, how do I get to my father’s Zen-ful state of wardrobe?

I am going to spend the next few days exploring my wardrobe “problem” and how to fix it. I think my father’s lesson on Zen clothing is an excellent one and I would like to align my life more with his example. There are some things I have been doing since the beginning of the year, and some additional things I will do the remainder of this year to get myself in a happy state with my clothing.

Well maybe not entirely so, but it does cause noticeable depression. “As within, so without,” is how the saying goes. It is a self-perpetuating cycle though. We get more stuff to feel better, but it really just causes more overwhelm. So what do we do? We buy a bigger house to hold our stuff so that it doesn’t look as cluttered.

There is a pattern that so many of us go through, and part of it is because we have children and growing families. We spend the first twenty or thirty years working ten hour days at the office to upgrade our living arrangements to bigger and better. Then we spend our waning years downgrading them again to something smaller, easier to take care of, and more comfortable. What if we never upgraded? What if we stayed in our starter home? Statistics show that there is a geometric growth in the amount of space the average family of four lives in now as opposed to fifty years ago. Affluence is great but at what cost? We go into huge debt for us. Our great grandparents did not buy anything on credit. If you did not have the cash for it, then you couldn’t afford it. Now anyone born from 1975 and on has grown up with credit cards. It is so ingrained in us. Watch any number of commercials these days. Credit Card companies act like they are your friends. They sit there on TV telling you how they can help you afford anything you want, on easy payments.

We don’t care how much stuff costs any longer. All we care about is what the monthly payment is.

What kind of way is this for us to live? So many people now just get in so deep, that they go and declare bankruptcy, just as if it was no big decision at all. Bankruptcy does not fix the major underlying problem; that we simply cannot control our desire for instant gratification. Most people who declare bankruptcy find themselves right back in the same mess. It turns out that the banks will start offering you credit cards again within a few months after your bankruptcy is final. So you are right back in the same mess that you were before. Bankruptcy is almost never the answer. Trust me, when I was sitting at over fifty grand in debt, I thought about how easy it would be to wash it away in a bankruptcy, but you should at least have a moral obligation to pay back that which you took, even if it is to pay back the mean nasty banks.

Moderation with money means that you will actually have some left at the end of the paycheck. For far too many people this is not true. For many of those that do have a little bit of money left, it doesn’t amount to enough to be considered significant savings. The majority of the people in the United States are just a month or two of lost paychecks from being out on the street. It is frightening that, in light of all our technological advancements, that we are still not very far off from the condition of people in third world countries.

Spending less than you earn is more important now than ever. With the influx of baby boomers retiring, there is significant doubt whether social security, as we know it, will still be available when today’s thirty-something’s retire in the year 2035 and beyond. We must take responsibility for our own retirement from now on. If there is social security at the end of the rainbow, then all the better, but we cannot sit here and depend on it. We’ve spent too much of our history depending on the government to bail us out from our own stupid moves.
Living in moderation is an easy concept to understand but it is hardly easy to practice. The problem is that most of the time the universe is working against you. Like a pendulum swinging back and forth with a single ideal focal point on the ground, we rarely find ourselves sitting at the ideal point on the pendulum line. This is the reason why we all find ourselves getting sidetracked on the way toward our goals. As with weight loss, for example, or any other New Year’s resolution, we find ourselves doing well for the first few weeks. We get up early to go to the gym every morning, workout on the treadmill for an hour, eat nothing but lettuce and water for every meal; the pendulum is reaching the apex of its forward swing. Now the pendulum starts swing hard the other way, and with the force of gravity, you come crashing down. At first you miss a day at the gym because you overslept. Then you fall off your diet because, you reason, that you have been so good and have lost ten pounds. It’s time to treat yourself to that steak and hot fudge sundae dinner you have been craving. One thing leads to another and you are ten pounds heavier than you were on New Year’s Day.

You can struggle as you might to prevent this pendulum from swinging but when it comes down between you and a Universal Law, the Universe is going to win every time.

Sounds hopeless, doesn’t it? So what’s a person to do when stacked up against these odds? This is the reason why crash diets never work. They are too extreme. They set this pendulum swinging with great force. It will swing wildly in both directions. As Newton stated, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The most important thing is that you realize that this universal law exists. To minimize the effects that the pendulum has, it is important to not set it swinging so wildly. Let it swing gently and follow it on the path of least resistance.

That means you must make change slowly. If you were to suddenly throw out 95% of your worldly possessions because your home feels so cluttered, you would feel good for about fifteen minutes before you found yourself running out to the store to buy back that which you recently discarded. Instead, slow, steady, sustainable, and incremental improvement is the best method to employ for any subject in this Blog. Realize that you are going to go through bouts of paring down your possessions while later building some of them back up. As long as you make sure that overall you are showing some improvement, you will surely get to your goals. Anything that you buy back will be from a new perspective. It will be with the thought in mind that you want to live a more clutter-free life.

As part of my resolutions for 2008, I have been slowly adding some positive habits to my morning routine with the hopes of improving the key areas of my life: Family, Health, Spirituality, and my Writing.

Gratitude:
The first thing I do when I open my eyes in the morning is to express gratitude for everything in my life, the seemingly good and the seemingly bad. There is always multiple ways of looking at a situation in your life, and what seems bad will always have a lesson or an opportunity in there for you. This is simply looking at the bright side of everything in your life, your family, your relationships, your job, your health, etc. and being grateful for it all. This gratitude raises your vibrational energy level to receive more of the wonderful things that the universe has to offer. These moments of gratitude, whether it is a prayer or a simple thank you to God or the Universe is the most important habit you can develop as it sets the tone for everything else in your life.

Flush It Out
The next two things that I do help flush the body of toxins. I make sure that I have two glasses of filtered, room temperature water before I do anything else. This will help establish a routine of regular elimination. I strongly recommend, for those who are interested, reading Dr. F. Batmanghelidj’s book, Your Body’s Many Cries for Water. The basic premise is that many of our symptom’s of sickness are truly just signs that we are dehydrated. Again, I am not qualified to dispense professional medical advice, but I do know that this book helped me with my personal health.

Stretching
For me, what comes next is spending a few minutes doing some Yoga or T’ai Chi exercises in the hopes of shaking out some additional toxins in the body. My exercise habits are a series of blog posts on their own, but suffice to say, any sort of stretching would be beneficial in the morning to help eliminate lactic acid build up in your muscles and joints.

Brainstorming Session
This is the habit of writing Morning Pages that I picked up from reading Julia Cameron’s excellent book, The Artist’s Way . The concept is to write two to three pages of whatever thoughts come into your head in the morning, no matter how silly or mundane they may be. This is truly a brain dump on paper and you shouldn’t pause from writing the entire time. This is not time to think, only time to write. I generally time this at fifteen minutes, rather than a page count. Time is precious in the mornings for me because I will often try to fit a short workout or I will do my blogging too in the morning before I go off to my day job.

Cleaning
The only other habit I make sure I do in the morning, apart from the customary shower, shave, brushing of the teeth, and some manner of breakfast, is to set the timer for ten minutes and clean up a hot area of my house. Clutter is such a hot button for me, because I am a recovering clutter-holic. This ten minutes gives me some piece of mind for my day.

I remember reading back in High School called the Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield. I have forgotten more of this great book than I remember but I do recall quite vividly the first insight that has made a lasting impact on my life: Pay attention to the coincidences in your life. I am paraphrasing, but that is the essence of the first prophecy from that book. As a side note, I re-ordered that book today to give it another go around. As Henry Drummond is quoted as saying, “When you read a book through the second time, you don’t see something in it you didn’t see before, you see something in yourself that wasn’t there before.” Redfield’s book was one of those life-changing moments for me. It taught me that there were other roads to spirituality apart from Catholicism which I grew up with, but as an adult, I made a conscious choice to seek out more answers.

Okay, like all good blogs, I have lost my focus here at 7:00am. So with a second cup of coffee, let’s bridge the gap and get back to “Enthusiasm.” I am reading another great book right now, by Paulo Coehlo, “The Pilgrimage.” I came across a passage that particularly struck me, that forced me to put down the book and meditate on the message given. Just prior to the halfway mark of the book, the narrator, who is on the Road to Santiago to metaphorically find himself, illustrates a lesson with his guide on the concept of Agape, which is love powered by enthusiasm. As children, we are absolutely fascinated by everything, from what is on our dinner plates, to the bugs crawling on concrete. We approach learning with the greatest of enthusiasm, perhaps to impress others, but more likely because this world is actually a fascinating place, warts and all.

At some point in pre-pubescence, this diminishes, and by the time we are adults, on our own, with the freedom to do whatever we wish, the world no longer fascinates us. We fall into routine that, though malleable, we become stagnant for the rest of our lives. We learn more in the first five years of our lives than we do in the remaining seventy-odd years. The major reason this is so, I think, is because of enthusiasm, agape, this wild-eyed wonder about our world.

The message that Coehlo is trying to get across is that we need to re-awaken that enthusiasm in us, in order to break routine, in order to start building a life worth living. There are exercises in the book that help to awake this. I will not spoil the book otherwise. It is a great read and for $14, the investment is most worthwhile.

So I set the book down at this point to meditate a few minutes on the concept of enthusiasm, and what this could bring to my writing and my music. Then I picked up the latest edition of the magazine, The Writer, and started reading an article on a nineteen year old author who published her first book when she was ten. She said the key to her writing success was Enthusiasm.

That’s where the first Celestine Prophecy regarding coincidences comes into play. I ripped out the article and tucked it neatly in my Paulo Coehlo book and then headed into my little computer room/studio. For the next two hours I put enthusiasm to work and came up with five distinctly different song structures that I will be busily completing over the next few days in the hopes of putting together an electric set so we can branch out from Coffee Houses. It was one of those rare moments where the Muse was speaking quite clearly to me.
I hope to be able to capture that moment more regularly with my net of enthusiasm. Anyway, that’s all for today. I have songs to put together for my Starbuck’s gig tonight.

Peace,
Charlie

Hey, Jealousy….

Two people I know just went out and bought luxury cars very recently and even though I am very happy for them because they work very hard for what they have, I felt really inferior too. Sure, I had the calculator working in my head trying to see how I could afford a luxury car payment but I also know that they way things are now, that we can’t afford it.

I remember listening to a story told by financial self-help author John M Cummuta in his Debt-FREE & Prosperous Living course, where he describes his high-spending days before he mended his ways. John once owned a gold corvette and the very first time he showed it to a friend he got a very emphatic “wow” out of that person. The next time he was with the same friend he got literally no further response out of him regarding the car. John came to the conclusion that he was paying over $500 (1980’s dollars) a month “for one wow.”

And that is how I try to look at it when I need a reason to justify passing on a purchase. $500 a month in my neck of the woods is a mortgage payment. It also makes a nice hefty credit card payment and gets me a heckuva lot closer to my goals.

So it’s in these “darker” moments, when envy rears its ugly head, I have to remind myself why I am watching my money. My wife and I desperately want to get out of debt and we are making excellent progress toward that in 2008. While I am paid well in the Banking world, I truly am unhappy in my position doing my day-to-day tasks. My passion is writing and music (Shameless plug: please check out my free music downloads with the link from the right-hand navigation).

My ultimate goal is to be able to support my family as a full-time writer and musician. So, as I posted yesterday, I ask myself in these moments, will this purchase of a (insert luxury item here) get me closer to, or further away from my goals? It’s at that moment when I become quite content with my paid-for 2003 Jeep Wrangler.

It’s the same with our housing. My wife and I own three duplexes in an aging city, one of which we live in. Most of our friends and co-workers own very nice homes in the suburbs. Sometimes, it honestly makes me fell inferior, especially since I group up in a nice home in the suburbs and my brother grew up to own a large home in the suburbs. My father, who also worked for forty years in the financial industry, has confided in me on certain occasions that he is proud of me and thinks that we are smart for what we are doing. Our rents cover all of our mortgages, with a few hundred dollars to spare every month. This allows us to really dedicate our paychecks to paying debt and building wealth. So even though all three of our houses cost less than my brother’s one home, I find solace in that we are building for our future, without sacrificing today.

I understand that our situation is unique. It’s an awful housing market out there and, in many cities, you would not be able to make a profit buying properties and renting them out. That’s why I am careful when I dispense financial advice. I try to tell people what works for us and why it does, with the disclaimer that everybody’s situation is different. And I try hard not to let it bother me when I tell people about our housing situation and they walk away wondering why I am proud of it.

Those who are seeking an answer, who are unhappy with their current situation, will understand, just as I finally came to that realization a few years ago, and that’s what drives me to write about these subjects. One, it helps me to organize and understand the concepts, and two, hopefully as this site grows, there will be others that will find this information helpful.

I think the single most important lesson I ever learned in regards to finances is to track every penny that I spend.  I am failing to recall exactly where I learned that.  It wasn’t from my parents…it was taboo to discuss finances in my household even though my father was a banker and now I also work in the finance industry.  It certainly wasn’t in school, where I think the teaching of personal finance should be compulsory for all students before graduating high school. 

It was either from one of the many great Simple Living sites I frequent or it was from the book, “Your Money or Your Life” by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin which I first read back in 1995 while I was a senior in college.  I was the habit of tracking money had truly sunk into my head back then, it would have helped to avoid the many sleepless nights that I have experienced since due to my own financial mistakes.  But when I vowed to make a new change in 2008, I’ve managed to keep this habit in practice this year.

What I do is I keep a fragment of a 3 X 5 card cut in half the long way in my wallet.  It fits nicely with the dollar bills.  And every time I spend anything at all, I write the amount and the subject on the card.  Some folks like to just keep their receipts, but I noticed that sometimes, the vendor would forget to give me one and I would fail to ask, plus the index card is more like to help me avoid George Costanza-wallet caused from a pile of receipts.

The next part is completely dependent upon your preference.  Approximately once a week, I take the data on the index card and input on a spreadsheet.  Some folks like to track everything in Quicken or Microsoft Money.  That’s completely fine, though having worked as a help desk person for personal financial management software; I know that the programs are often touchy.  Personally, I have always trusted Microsoft Excel.  You can set up as many categories as you want and, if you are savvy, set up a slew of formulas to calculate spending to income ratios, etc.

The sheet that I use I bought on the Internet for ten dollars about ten years ago.  It was a software program called Money-Man 2.0 by RSI-Software.  Unfortunately, my searches on the Internet to find them in 2008 have been fruitless.  I think they may not be in business any longer, but if somebody knows differently, please send me a web address and I would be happy to post it under my links section.  In any event, it’s not a big deal, a simple spreadsheet is all you need and you can create your own categories in the first column.  You would need a column to track the outgoing dollar amounts.  I also have a section to track my income for the month too.  This allows me to do the ratios.  And you need columns for every calendar month that you intend to track for.

Tracking my money helps me to think twice about every purchase.  Categorizing expenditures helps me realize where the true leaks are in my spending.  I think that if you only forced yourself to do this for one month, you would learn a great deal about your spending habits.  I know that it’s helped me gain tremendous perspective this year and to help make decisions on what is truly important enough for me to spend my hard-earned money on.

I promise that I won’t make every post about decluttering, but it is a favorite topic of mine and I would like to follow up a bit on yesterday’s thoughts.

The easy answer to too much clutter is to just start ruthlessly tossing things in your home.  The problem is that, unless you live in a studio apartment, it’s darn near impossible to get this done in a single weekend.  At the very least, pick one room, or one corner of the room and set a thirty-minute timer and get started…

Take a look at each item in the room and analyze it piece by piece.  There are two questions I generally ask myself about each item:

1. Do I find this item either extremely useful or beautiful? – If not, get rid of it.
2. Is this item something that will take me closer to, or further away from my goals (i.e. Financial Independence, Work from home, etc.)? – If the answer is “further away” then get rid of it.

Life is too short to be spent in the pursuit of accumulating useless clutter.  I think if you analyzed the real cost of an object at the point of purchase, the cost to maintain or the cost to store, you’d be able to nip a lot of this clutter in the bud.

Set up three boxes in the room you are decluttering, and each object either stays where it is or it finds its way into one of the boxes. 

Box 1 is for items that you are going to keep but belong in another room of the house.

Box 2 is for items that you are going to donate, sell, give away, or whatever manner that will keep these items out of a landfill.  I would hope that this box would contain the most items.

Box 3 is for items that are not suitable to pass along to someone else.  Either they are broken beyond repair or, in the case of clothing, too soiled and torn to be given away.  If it’s a cotton t-shirt or underwear, consider using it as a rag before throwing it in this box.  If it is a rag…put it with your cleaning supplies immediately.

Okay, the items it Box 3 go in the trash immediately.  Box 2 is the tricky one and there are a few ways to handle this.  The thing you don’t want to happen is that you procrastinate on this box and end up pulling stuff out of it again and putting it back on a shelf.  Either action it now or seal the box up, date it, and stick it in the garage for six months.  If you haven’t missed the items in there in that time, just donate the whole box.  This is the method that has worked best for me.  I do not have the patience to sit there and sell the items online.  First of all, the box will sit around in your room for six months while you go through the pains of listing every item online, monitoring your sales, and packaging everything up for shipping.  If you want to make extra money and you have the patience, by all means, go right ahead, but I would still suggest getting that box out of the way…out of sight, out of mind.

Box 1 items need to find a home immediately.  Everything should be placed into its area of chief functionality.

Obviously, the best way to be clutter-free is to not buy stuff in the first place, but for many of us, we have to make up for our past consumptive habits.  Use the technique above, and be brutally honest about the worth of your stuff.  Chances are, someone else will think that it’s worth a lot less than you do.  If you doubt that, go to an estate sale sometime where somebody’s hard-earned possessions are being sold for pennies on the dollar.

Tomorrow, we will visit this topic a little further. 

One of my favorite topics is decluttering.  I am a hardcore, declutter bible-thumper.  The reason is simple, I am a recovering clutter-holic.  Books, music, magazines, papers, clothing…these are my compulsions.  But I am a writer, I used to rationalize, so I need to keep the last four years of Writer’s Digest lying around collecting dust.  I may need that article from four years ago as inspiration.

And of course, all the magazines that I want to write for.  You have to research them, right?  So really good research means keeping five or six of each one around to read through.  That would be really great research if I had ever opened up any of them to read.

Hey I had six books on decluttering, another six on simple living…my life was anything but simple.  I had books about losing weight, working out, buying real estate, stock options, commodities, mobile homes, business notes.  Books on writing books…

Oh, and music…let’s see, any reason that I need to have all of those Heavy Metal CD’s I rocked out to, and last listened to in 1987?  I cannot tell you how many times I “nearly” got rid of them, only to save them from the landfill.  Sure I could sell them online, but four hundred of them, part time…that would take me a couple of years.

Probably the smartest thing I ever did was take the time over several weeks to catalog them all…then mark whether I had actually read them or not, or whether I had listened to the music in the last twelve months.

I can tell you that of the three hundred books that I logged, I had read less than ten percent of them and the fact was, that I really had no desire to go back and read them.  Ditto on the CD’s.  Hadn’t listened to many of them in years, hadn’t listened to many of them all the way through to the end ever.

Clothing…I LOVE a good deal.  Let me tell you that I had forty button down shirts in my closet.  Nine of which were still in there packaging from being purchased on sale six months prior.  They were in colors that were not my favorite, but hey they were a great deal so I bought them anyway.  What I did is that I took them all out of the closet and placed them in a spare closet.  Then over the course of six months, I took out what I wanted to wear on a given day, and made sure they ended up in my good closet.  Fact is, I wore the same ten shirts over and over.  So, Goodwill got them, many of them still in original packaging.

Tastes change.  Not just in clothing, but music, books etc.  So I came to the realization that if I had no desire to back and read, listen to, or wear something, it was time to pass them along to someone who would…immediately.