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Thursday, January 21, 2010

Material World


Moving is an interesting exercise.

I've been working on my 100 Thing Challenge now for a year or two. When I was getting ready to leave Arizona for Vietnam, I got rid of a lot of things: furniture, clothing, household goods, my car. It was easy in the beginning to find things that I didn't need or want. I had four or five different yard sales within a year, donating whatever didn't sell to charity. It felt good to purge all that extra stuff.

I wound up bringing about 400 things with me to Vietnam. Not bad for a first try.

When I moved to Shanghai, China this month, I went through the task again of getting rid of things. I left a whole pile of books, clothing, & other items with one of my Vietnamese friends. I pared down my four pieces of luggage that I brought with me from Arizona to three. Still, I came to Shanghai with just about 400 things. How did that happen?

Now that I have an apartment, I find that I'm already accumlating more things: a pot, a dish, a cup, sheets, a pillow... Maybe I should change my challenge to 500 things instead!

2 comments:

michelle said...

500 things sounds like a good idea. What is the benefit of the 100 things anyway? Besides being able to say you only need 100 things? Is it going to make you happier?
One could argue that life would be easier with only 100 things to be responsible for, but maybe you would just be spending lots of time trying to borrow the other things you don't have, or trying to come up with ways to compensate for the stuff you got rid of... just so you could have 100 things...

Nancy Lewis said...

Good point. It's more of a fun little experiment for me. I just thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if I tried to live with 100 things, & I'm learning that it's really hard to do.