Purgery!
I’ve hit a wall of maturity!
Well may be not maturity, but somehow that line comes to mind when I think of life changes. I remember a friend in high school laying that epiphanic line on myself and some of his all-of-the-sudden immature friends. It was a sea change moment for him. We didn’t get it. “What a dick. He’s going to Penn State he’s not lecturing at Oxford.” We collectively thought, and I never talked to the dude again. Why would I? I was busy making mix tapes of my farts.
But the fact remains, we can go through some major changes in short order. The way we look at things can be altered by a large life changing event ( insert your choice here- birth, death of a loved one, illness, financial windfall, varmint attack, whatever). My little epiphany came when we decided we might want to sell the house.
Wow, I have collected a lot of shit.
And it feels all of it is of vital importance. Like t shirts from high school, receipts from a $47 pair of socks I purchased trying to gain a client of an upscale men’s store, old dog toys of long past dogs, old National Geographics (why does parting with them feel like a crime against education?), old whiskey bottles, rocks.
So, with a renewed sense of what matters I
have begun to purge a lot of junk. And it feels great. It is freeing. A new flexibility is upon me. My father always preached “waste not want not.” It has not come easy and the process of purging has involved burning things, landfills as a last resort, scrap yards, yard sales, and plenty of goodwill trips. All in the name of shrinking our footprint. We still have a ways to go, but I see the light at the end of the tunnel, just over the stack of 1987 National Geographics. 
A visit to the scrap yard netted us $5.50!
My dogs have been pushing this idea on my deaf ears since I was a kid. Nothing is more important than the ones you love. The things you love are nice, but you really only need to bring one tennis ball.