live simply

This past week I donated more books to the hospital. I think they let the patients take the books home with them. It’s a wonderful feeling that the books I don’t need can go to a good cause!

Instead of buying a cedar chest as my hope chest, I’m using a plastic storage container and I don’t plan on replacing it. It serves its purpose for holding all my hopes for the future and that’s all I need.

Throughout the past few months, I’ve donated bags of stuff to charity and decided to give the books I didn’t need at the time to the hospital. (They were so grateful!) A few days ago, the realization came over me that there’s even more material posessions that I don’t care for anymore. It makes me feel great that I can live without some things that I thought I’d never let go of. I took more books off my shevles and stored them away for now. Pretty soon I’m going to work on being more organized. The thing that always gets in the way when simplifying is thinking that “I might need this one day.” The truth is in the future, I probably won’t need a lot of what I have now. I must learn to live with less!

“Live simply” is so broad and the best way to achieve this goal is to break it down into bite-sized pieces. There’s many areas of my life that I want to simplify and improve on like save more time and money, focus on and know what’s important, need and want less (I’m still working on my wish list), declutter…This can really go on forever.

I think I’m going to start with managing my time better. I spend way too much of it online and I never used to have this problem! Since yesterday though, I’ve seen a major difference. I spent a lot of time reading and catching up in my diary. I did okay today. Hopefully I’ll be making more progress soon!

I spent a lot of today looking through my Amazon wish list because there were a lot of items that I was forgetting about. I deleted so much and it feels great to want and need less. Now that my list is shorter, I can keep track of the items on there better. Doing this wasn’t easy. For some things, I had to really think about whether I wanted this, if I would ever use it, and most of all, do I need this? If the answer was no to all 3 questions, I clicked “delete” and I don’t even think about it now. This was a time-consuming process, but it’ll pay off in the end becuase I just saved myself a ton of money and space!

I love reading, but I’ve learned that I can’t keep every single book I read! I hate when I buy books and then they just sit there, taking up space and collecting dust. Of course I have favorite books that I look back in once in a while, but the ones I don’t need I’ll be giving to a book drive at my school. I really need to start using the library!

I also love listening to music, and I’ve realized that I have so many CDs that I don’t listen to, or if I do, there’s only a few songs I like on some of them. On Thursday, I burned the songs I favor on the CDs I want to get rid of on blank discs, and this only took up two of them! The rest will go to charity.