Create More Vitality! Throw Away Cherished Possessions

I just got an email from S, a woman in the process of walking away from her old life. “Jenny, I really don’t find trying to sell my stuff exciting at all. At times, I just want to walk away from everything with just the money in my pocket. It’s stressful! But now that I think about it, I suppose I am responsible for my own stress huh?”

My answer to S: I recommend, if at all possible, walking away from your stuff. Usually, the time it takes to get a sale leads to too low a return. Forward momentum is fragile; if you get discouraged too much, you can get distracted from the big picture. I set my stuff on the curb here in L.A. and people come by to pick it up in a matter of hours, sometimes minutes. It’s amazing how easy it is! Free gifts for the world! I end up feeling really good about myself and feeling good is worth a million bucks! Feeling good turns the junk in your pocket into seeds from which a million new flowers will bloom!

Here’s a photo of some of the stuff I set on the curb. It hurts me to look carefully at this photo. There’s the baby blanket my best friend gave me when Weixin (my oldest) was born! And there’s the split reel from the editing room of my feature film, I must have used it a million times. These old things are charged with sweet memories: each one a piece of me, each a symbol of a time long gone. When I see what I’ve given up, I feel like a part of me has died. It pains me to see how they were left on the curbside, as if my corpse was unceremoniously dumped in the street.

Things from a bitter past I have no trouble dumping: it feels good to forgive, forget and move on! I find sweet memories much harder to part with. The sentimental side of me carries a ton of weight and I love to carry that weight because it’s so sweet. Cutting them off from me is painful, like cutting off a finger. Having actually done that, I can say that it’s definitely a good thing to do! (Sorry, Wei Baby One, your baby blanket didn’t make it to your baby!) Leaving them behind gives me the speed I need today for my New Reality life. I move fast, here and now, my life full of freedom and mystery. I feel weightless, almost transparent and fresh like flowing water, not sweet and heavy like gooey honey.

The other things I see in this photo are useful items: a perfectly good coffee maker, a whole set of nice dishes, a fax machine (it worked miracles for me back when I used to fax) and a TV that is not in the photo. After I set out the stuff, I went back to get the camera and by the time I came back, the TV was gone! I could use these things today. Wouldn’t it be better to pack them in a corner, so that I don’t find myself buying the same things? No! It’s better to just dump them. The universe abhors emptiness. When some space is empty, the universe rushes in to fill it. Empty space is therefore creative space. The incoming energy is always more appropriate to the new you. I don’t fax these days and I don’t watch TV anymore, so I have no use for those things. As for dishes, the new me likes variety, so uniform sets of dishes have no place in my New Reality!