Monday, October 28, 2013

Dump It! You CAN Let Some Things Go!

I was talking to a friend the other day about overcoming past issues. The remark was made that sorting out everything and getting things in order was hard. My response led me to a tweet:

@BillSnodgrass: Sometimes, you just have to dump your box out so you can sort out your mess. 
#LiveBetter

Why do we cling to things we need to let go? We keep them in our life-boxes, cluttering up everything and limiting our options? We hold on to useless (or harmful) habits, harsh words said by unloving others, negative attitudes, impossible expectations (often imposed by critical others)... We cling to old, no longer applicable, ways of doing things as if they still have a chance of leading to some desired outcome. Why do we do this? Why do we carry all these things around in our life-boxes endlessly?

Perhaps it is easier to just keep going and keep carrying things with us? There is some comfort in the familiar, even if the familiar keeps us from experiencing a better, smarter, healthier way of living. We plod on, unchanged by the changing world around us, unaffected by the new reality of our life, doing what we have always done, believing what we have always believed. We fill our life-box with junk crowding out what could be good and healthy alternatives!

Yet at some point, our life-box is so full, so cluttered, we are hindered from growing and becoming the person we are meant to be. We are stuck with what was, what has been, dragging the weight of the past as we try to soar into the future. We need to stop. We need to look at the contents of our life-box, keeping the good, the adaptive, the functional, the healthy and we MUST reject all the dead, pointless, hurtful rest.

Dumping out the box is messy, hard, and sometimes painful, but... Well, sometimes we need to do it.