A friend of mine and one-time love, Scott, got on my case recently about the fact I’ve stopped writing. In response to me making wistful noises about wanting to write, Scott wrote back: “Steph, a lot of people want to write. Heck, I want to write. You, however, are a writer. So start writing again already.”

Now, I am certainly guilty at snarling at Scott on occasion, but, even on a bad day, I will admit that he’s pretty good at calling things like he sees them. Most of the time I appreciate that trait about him.

Here’s the thing–I may be a writer, but I’ve always struggled with putting words on paper when I feel like my life is falling down about my ears.

To me, there are two types of writers when it comes to how they handle crisis… those who can turn inward and draw comfort from their writing during those difficult times and those who dry up until they are able to resolve the crisis at hand. I have always firmly fallen into the second camp.  I’m not sure I can even articulate why. But when things that are deeply important to me start going wrong: relationships, work, health of loved ones, etc., the words stop flowing.

This certainly hasn’t been the smoothest of years on a lot of fronts. Ending my relationship with Charlie was really freaking rough. Struggling with a difficult job and then losing it was also rough. But then, most of the people I’m close to seem to have had a pretty tough time in 2009.

Anyway, obviously things have turned around enough that I’m feeling the urge to write again. So let’s start with the good news… As of the beginning of December, I became once again gainfully employed.

The day I lost my job I started reaching out to work contacts of mine. A friend of mine at a former employer in the brokerage industry was kind enough to send me two job reqs and also to put in an enthusiastic good word for me (along with her boss who was also familiar with my work). The interview process took about a month and involved a last-minute flight to San Francisco, but I ended up being offered a Senior Manager position working with client data which is where I tend to be happiest.

So, two months to the day of when I lost my job, I received my first paycheck from my new employer. In that regard, I know I’m a lot more fortunate than a lot of people out there right now.

In my new position I’m making close to what I was previously and, so far, I’m working a lot less hours. My vacation and health benefits are better, as well. Some really weird things clicked together for me on the job front which I’ll talk about in later posts. However, suffice it to say, the “Hand of God” phenomena seems to be continuing.  To what end, I really wish I knew.  But no one seems interested in filling me in on the plan.

So what’s the downside? The downside is that the position is based out of Phoenix. I had planned to spend the winter in AZ since my place in Portland is not complete weatherized yet. But that doesn’t work out so well in terms of what I had planned come spring.

I am a virtual member of a team that is based out of San Francisco. So a case could possibly be made that I’m already working remotely. But there are some advantages to me being based in the call center the brokerage has in Phoenix. So, yeah, there’s some longer-term issues that remain to be resolved.

A big thing I need to determine is whether my hunkering down in Phoenix is a temporary thing where I simply need the comfort and support of my friends for a time. Or, rather, if it’s my way of conceding defeat about all the renovations that still need to be done to my place in Portland and the loneliness of starting over in a new place away from all friends and family.  I’m just not sure I’m that tough anymore in terms of going it alone.

Here’s what the readers of Coming Unmoored probably won’t like… I have gone so far as to list my little house in Portland with a realtor for the winter. But, considering the current real estate market and the amount of work that remains to be done, I’ll be surprised if anyone expresses interest in it. And, quite frankly, I’m kind of hoping no one does. I really don’t think I want my hand to be forced until I know what I would like to have happen.

I’ve clearly torn on the subject because I’ve spent the last week delaying writing this post. I just didn’t want to have to type the words admitting that I’ve put my place up for sale. It haunts me. I know also, though, that I’m feeling lonely and beaten up from this year and am not ready to take on the place construction-wise again until at least spring. Both my emotions and my bank account are calling it quits for the present time being.

The good news, though, is I seem to have found a safe place to hunker down and consider my options. I have a job and a place to stay this winter close to friends. That feels like quite a lot, right now.

No, you’re not seeing things, guys.  I’ve gone back temporarily to the old layout for the blog.  Odds are you’re going to see further changes over the next few weeks as I rethink how I want to manage content.

Along with several other areas of my life, I feel like I got off-track with the direction of Coming Unmoored.  Now that I have some time and energy again I hope to take things in some new directions.

I had also wanted to experiment some with advertising.  I think I’ve now got a reasonable sense of what works on this site and what doesn’t.  I think I’ve reached the conclusion that the visually distracting Google Adsense ads are going to  go permanently away.  The Textlink ads in actual article entries and those that appear at the bottom of the RSS feed are going to remain for the present.

Rather ironically, the past two months in which I’ve had very little time to devote to the blog are actually the first two in which the blog turned a profit after all operating expenses.  Go figure.

More than anything, though, I hope to continue to grow Coming Unmoored as both a record of my personal journey and as a resource for others making their own.

October 15, 2009 turned out to be what I’ve come to refer as a “Hand of God” Day.

Those are the handful of days in my life when it feels as though whatever divine entity who’s in charge of the universe exceeds his (or her) patience waiting for me to grasp whatever the current lesson is I’m supposed to be grokking and decides to step in in a far more direct fashion to move things along.

My “Hand of God” Days have never been pretty affairs. But then, I guess that’s rather unrealistic to hope for when Fate decides to step in and starts rearranging things in someone’s world like a two-year-old redecorating a doll house.

My last real “Hand of God” day prior to the most recent was the day my now ex-husband came home from work, made us a lovely three-course meal and then, between course one and two calmly informed me that he’d decided the best thing he could do is go out, buy a gun from Walmart, and blow both of us away “to put us out of our misery”. Suffice it to say, I didn’t end up staying for dessert. That was the day when I realized I really had to get out of my marriage before I ended up dead..

My current “Hand of God” day involved me checking in for my weekly one-on-one with my boss only to be greeted by an HR Rep and the information that my employer no longer required my services.

Now, anyone who’s been following this blog will probably know that I’d been struggling with my job for awhile. Actually, “struggling” is too polite a word. My job has been knocking the snot out of me most of 2009. In September I’d actually started to enact a plan I’d hashed-out in the hopes of eventually being able to transition out of my current job into something I hoped to like more. But the time frame for my escape was apparently way-too-conservative for the Powers-that-Be. So the Divine hand dropped in to the picture and handed me a pink slip from my high-salary job in the banking industry.

I’m almost embarrassed to admit that my first reaction upon receiving the news was: “Oh thank, God. This means I don’t have to work through the weekend again!” The panic of being jobless and having no immediate prospects for a new position didn’t hit until the middle of that first night.

Since then, I’ve been busily doing all the right things. I’ve been going through all the paperwork hoops for Unemployment benefits. I’ve gotten my COBRA coverage up and running. I’m networking. I’m interviewing. I’ve actually found a couple of positions I feel I’d be a great match for. But all of this still falls into the category of “survival mode” for me. These are the things I need to do in order to weather the current storm.

There still remains to be answer the bigger question of what I want to be doing with my life. How do I want to use my remaining time on this planet and given talents? And I know I need to figure out the answers to that question soon.

The universe just handed me an opportunity to point my life a new, better direction. And I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that if I don’t seize this chance the way I’m supposed to, things will get impatiently shaken up again.  And again.  Until I get the lesson.

No offense to the Powers-That-Be, but one snowglobe-style shake-up of my life every couple of years is quite enough. So please believe me when I say: “I’m on it, Boss.”

Today I finally made time to go see Julie and Julia before it completely left the theater.  For those of you who missed the trailer, the movie follows the parallel stories of Julia Child and Julie Powell, an aspiring writer.  Powell is a passionate foodie who, searching for some sort of  “meaningful accomplishment” in her life on the verge of turning 30, decides to cook through Child’s cookbook in a year and blog about the experience.

This movie caught my attention for a number of reasons.  First, my mother and brother were avid watchers of Julia Child as I was growing up.

Now, I’ll be the first one to confess that I’m pretty much culinarily challenged.  My friends have a longstanding joke that my survival strategy involves always falling in love with men who enjoy cooking.  Amongst my many ignoble disasters in the kitchen, I have managed the feat of setting fire to my kitchen cabinets attempting nothing more ambitious than boiling a pot of water for Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.

I’ve never had much of an interest in cooking, but I have a deep appreciation of  good food.  And, growing up, Julia Child on the TV meant two things: 1) reasonably good entertainment and 2) interesting things happening in the family kitchen that beat my mom’s traditional Friday night zucchini quiche hands-down.

My childhood is laced with memories of Julia Child killing Bertha the Lobster, a provincial French table covered in 50 lbs. of monkfish, and random intervals of self-multilation and bloodshed coverage courtesy of PBS.  Better still, my younger brother Chris would get inspired by the showz and interesting things would happen in the kitchen courtesy of my family’s a much loved and bespattered copy of Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

With Julia Child a fixture of my childhood, I really enjoyed seeing Meryl Streep’s portrayal of her life.  What resonated with me even more, however, was Julie Powell’s half of the film.

Powell is just turning 30 at the beginning of the story and questioning what she has to show for her life.  I just recently turned forty and have been doing my own share of soul-searching about my life looking radically different than I expected it to by this point.

Powell is a frustrated aspiring writer who’s editor husband convinces her to start a blog.  I think the story does a humorously good job of capturing the narcissim and self-absorption involved with writing a personal blog on a regular basis.  Let’s face it.  There has to be a certain level of arrogance to put the details of one’s day-to-day existence out there in the public ether in the belief that anyone else out there is going to have any interest whatsoever in reading it.  And in prioritizing getting another post out there over spending quality time with one’s significant other.

Perhaps my favorite part of the film is when Powell has had two back-to-back major culinary disasters.  (Aspics, followed closely by stuffed chicken.)  She is lying prostrate on the floor of her kitchen amidst the remains of Disaster #2, howling in despair, when a writer for the Christian Science Monitor calls asking for an interview.  Powell immediately pops up and answers the phone sounding perky as a cheerleader and totally in command of the situation.  Oh yeah.  Been there.  More than once.

I also loved the relationship between Powell, her mother, and the blog.  While my own mother never voiced an opinion telling me to shut the thing down, like Powell’s, she tends to follow it, and mommy- radar kicks off when something breaks the normal pattern and concerned phone calls and emails follow.

Powell’s storyline resonated with me enough, that I just downloaded a copy of her book from which the movie was drawn: Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously.

Anyway, while I doubt it will be winning any Oscars, it’s definitely a movie I’d recommend to the Julia Child fans out there and also to female bloggers.  For my part, I am inspired to cook up some lovely, local-area corn for dinner (boiling is within my skill-set these days) and am busy reminiscing over Charlie’s lovely beed bourginon. 

So while I’ve been in AZ, I’ve been staying in my friend Jay’s guest room.  My current plan is to continue to rent a room for him while I’m down in AZ completing my certification course.

My friends in AZ are acquainted with Jay but for those readers who don’t know him, Jay is a 40-something, gay, black man I’ve been friends with going on two decades.  I’m sure you’ll be hearing more about Jay in the next few months, but I’ll start by saying that Jay’s decorating tastes diverge widely from my own. A lot.

Jay’s condo is known in my circle of friends as “Vermillion Manor”. Jay happens to believe Versailles is the peak of architectural achievement and he has designed the interior of his condo to be a miniature homage to Versailles’ glory.  He even has his own tiny hall of mirrors and collection of statuary.

Imagine walls and walls of mirrors, crystal chandeliers, baroque furniture, tassels cascading from every available vertical surface, and a surfeit velvet and you get the general vibe of the place where I’m staying.

Rumi took one look at the place, fell into immediate love, flounced upon the floor of the main salon, and announced loudly in Balinese that he had finally “arrived”.  I, on the other hand, with my love for zen lines and muted color schemes, have been cautiously tiptoeing around like an unplanned-for extra on the set of Night at the Museum.

I don’t in any way mean to make fun of Jay’s decorating.  Creating Vermillion has been an act of passionate creation for more than a decade, now.  And I’m fairly certain, Jay would feel as much a Stranger in a Strange Land aboard my floating home as I do padding barefoot around Vermillion.  But even Jay would concede that Vermillion can be a bit daunting for the first-timer.

To add to my whole down-the-rabbit-hole sensation, Jay has decided to dub me the “Lady in Residence” at Vermillion.  Unfortunately, if he had hoped having a woman in the residence was going to class-up the joint, I’m afraid he’s been sadly disappointed.  I’m much more of a Pygmalion-style project.

When I first arrived Jay had visions of the two of us sitting down on Sunday mornings to high tea with NPR Baroque Sundays wafting softly on the stereo.  I’m afraid his sensitive, artistic soul was well and truly crushed the first time I came home from a night at a fighter practice looking like a sweaty version of a Fraggle, popped open a domestic bottle of beer, and proceeded to share it with the cat–without either of us even bothering to use the crystal stemware intended for weekday use.

So far, though, Jay has been a remarkably good sport about me invading his sanctuary from the modern world.  And, for my part, I’ve been grateful for the lack of domestic chaos and also having regular good company in the form of a roommate.

I promise at some point I’ll do a more detailed video or photo tour of Vermillion.  I just know if I try to take any more pictures when Jay is home I’ll send him in to an apoplexy of cleaning and I’ve already disturbed his natural habitat more than enough for the present.

Okay, folks.  Sorry for going AWOL while I figured things out (at least as far as the short run at any rate).

Let me start by saying thank you for all of you who have sent notes or left comments of support.  They’ve really been appreciated.  I can’t say I’ve got everything sorted out but I’m slowly getting there.

Coming down to Phoenix has given me a chance to reconnect with friends, get relatively on top of work, and take a breather from renovation hell.  (I cannot begin to describe to you the depth of pleasure Rumi and I have both taken in being able to sprawl on a clean, carpeted floor…)

Part of the reason why there hasn’t been anything on the blog lately is I’ve been lost in soul-searching about how I wanted to handle the next few upcoming months.  I just reached a decision on that today.

I do intend to return to Portland and continue to work on the house.  However, in the short run, I really need to figure out things in terms of my work situation. More than anything, things not going well with my job has really sucked the life out of me.  While I continue to work hard to try to turn things around with my existing employment, I have also decided to extend my time down in Phoenix by a couple of months to finish a certification program I had started when I lived in Arizona previously.  I’ve decided I need an exit strategy in case things don’t improve (or my employer decides to let me go).  I’m sure I’ll be writing more about the specifics of this at some point.

Long story short, I’ll be starting classes in the evenings starting next week.  I should have my program pretty much wrapped up by the holidays (assuming the stress of holding down both a job and classes at night doesn’t do me in during the interim).

In the meantime, I get to spend some more time in a supportive environment amongst friends and family, which I can really use right now.

Alright, so apologies for disappearing on ya’ll but it’s been a couple of really rough weeks.  Several different areas of my life have been going less than ideally and things just hit a really nasty head.

For starters, I’ve been feeling overwhelmed with the interior renovations that remain to be done on my floating home.  I’m frustrated with how little progress I’ve managed to make this summer and the fact I’m still living in the middle of a construction zone.  I’m having a difficult time finding a healthy balance between work, working on the house, and actually managing to have some semblance of a life.

I’m also still mourning the end of my relationship with Charlie.  And, for whatever reason, working on the house alone just serves to underscore those feelings. It takes me a long time to build new friendships and relationships and I don’t have much in the way of a support system yet in Portland, so I’m feeling quite sad and alone.

On top of that, work is not going well for me at present.  I’n spite of working an insane number of hours for a large portion of the summer,  my current manager is less than pleased with my performance.  I just received my midyear review and it’s the first time in my professional career where I’ve received marks in some categories that were less than at least “Meets Expectations”.   Unless I can turn something around soon, odds are I’m going to need to be looking for a new job.  Right now I’m being micromanaged into the ground which I loathe. So I’m enormously stressed on the work front, as well.

So I was sitting up in Portland, miserable and unhappy, when I received a phone call that my friend Larry died suddenly of a heart attack. While not related by blood, Larry has been my de facto uncle since I moved to Arizona immediately after college.  He was always there with a smile, a hug, and a strong back when it came to moving furniture when I reached the end of relationship.  He was the person who always made sure I had somewhere to be on the holidays and got safely home to my own tent at camping events. And the thing was, he was that person for so many different people.  More than 600 people showed up for his service, if you can imagine that.

Losing Larry underscored to me just how adrift my own life is currently feeling.   How I chose to dealt with it was packing a suitcase, grabbing Rumi, and driving down to AZ for the funeral.  I already had plans to be in AZ the last two weeks of the month, over my birthday, so I simply extended my trip.

I’m currently staying in my friend Jay’s guest room in Phoenix.  I’ve been spending as much time in the company of friends as possible, meaning writing has been on the back burner.  Odds are I’m going to stay through the first weekend in September and then head back up to Portland.  I’m making arrangements, though, to probably winter in AZ once the weather turns ugly up north.

More on that when I figure it out myself.  But I wanted to let you all know I hadn’t been taken by brigands.  I’m just spending some time deep in thought about where I want to go from here.

Telling the truth has consequences.  In many cases, unpleasant ones.  If that wasn’t the case, we’d all be a lot more honest than we are on a regular basis.

It sounds like a couple of people may have gotten a little fired up about my recent series on Things We Thing But Do Not Say and been rather abruptly, uncomfortably honest with people around them to rather painful effect.  That really wasn’t my intended outcome, gang.  I’m sorry if I got you off and running in the wrong direction.

What I am trying to emphasize here, is self-knowledge.  I believe we have to start by getting really, bluntly honest with ourselves about what we really in our heart of hearts want for ourselves.  It’s only after we’ve done this we can figure out how to start making the necessary changes and adjustments to be on track.

While perhaps not the easiest path to walk, I believe there are ways we can be true to ourselves and, at the same time, still compassionate with our loved ones and friends in terms of how we communicate our truth.

They key thing, to me, is knowing what that truth is.  To that end, I’d like to suggest an exercise from Julia Cameron…

Every day for a week try completing the following phrase in writing twenty times:

If I really told the truth…

If I really told the truth…

If I really told the truth…

I pretty much guarantee that by Day Three you’re going to hate my guts for every suggesting such an inane exercise.  Keep with it.

If I really told the truth…

If I really told the truth…

I also guarantee that you’ll start having some pretty interesting ends to that sentence.  Go with it.

Do it for seven days.  At the end of that time you should have 140 “truths”.  Some of them will be completely vapid. (“I really should have gone for the double mocha chai this morning.”)  Some will be profound.  I guarantee that more than a few will take you by complete surprise.

I’d like to emphasize that as you do this exercise each day, don’t immediately run out and share the results.  Be a little protective of your fledgling, truth-telling self.  For now, it’s just important to get in touch with what your truth is.

Just do it for a week and see what you come up with.  Then, if you feel like sharing here you’re welcome to do so.  I think what’s more important, though, is what you’re able to honestly admit to yourself.

You may recall that awhile back I conducted a week-long media fast as part of a class I’m taking on The Artist’s Way.

For those of you who may not have read the original post, a media fast is a complete abstention from all forms of media. That means: no books, magazines, NPR, TV, movies, music with lyrics, email, frantic reading of the back of cereal boxes, etc.

Julia Cameron is not the first to suggest a media fast as a tool for personal development.  Many other self-help gurus (including my crush Tim Ferriss) recommend one ranging anywhere from a day to a month or more.   In it’s purest form it could resemble a Buddhist-style monastic retreat from the world.

Ideally someone participating in a media fast would keep their computer shut down for the length of the fast.  In my case, that was not possible based on the fact I telecommute for work and also had a minimal amount of non-work-related email and tasks to keep Coming Unmoored on track.  However, for a week I gave up all TV, radio, movies, books, and magazines.  I tried to only check more work email twice a day and limited my “blog support” time to no more than an hour a day.

I knew from my resistance to the exercise that the media fast was going to be a pretty radical departure from how I normally spent my time.  But, until I started the actual fast, I had no idea how deeply entrenched my reliance on media actual was.

I won’t lie to you.  My first 48 hours on the media fast were complete hell.  I actually ended up having to de-program all the radio stations on my car radio and hide the internet browser icon on my computer desktop because 5-10 minutes into any kind of silence, I would just automatically turn on the radio or pull up Firefox.  I didn’t even realize I was doing it.  It was just that habitual.

That week at the grocery store, I also ended up automatically throwing the latest issues of two magazines I enjoy into my cart.  The absurdity of buying magazines while I was on a media fast didn’t even hit me until I was home unpacking the groceries.

I also quickly realized just how little patience I have for waiting.  Sitting on hold for a customer service representative to answer on the phone suddenly because a torturous affair when I didn’t have the option to scroll through 100+ colorfully attractive ApartmentTherapy stories while I waited.

During this time, my mind also went completely wild.  It jabbered a loud, non-stop monologue about anything and everything desperately trying to fill the sudden silence.  Imagine Rowan Atkinson with a bad case of Turretts and you’ll have a pretty good idea what was going on inside my head.

In the first two days I ended up sleeping an insane number of hours.  This was in part due to the fact I simply couldn’t figure out what to do with my time.  But also, without the distraction of constant input, I finally got in touch with the fact that I had been going on overdrive for quite awhile was bone-weary tired.

Somewhere at about 48 hours into the media fast, something shifted.  My mind stopped frantically jabbering and fell into a profound sort of silence where it stayed for the remainder of the week.  Perhaps it had simply exhausted all its available material.  I’m really not sure.

I had thought I’d probably use much of my time during the week either writing or working on projects around the house.  But once the silence descended, all I really wanted to do is curl up in one of the chairs on my porch under a blanket and watch the river.  It’s hard to explain but it somehow became endlessly fascinating to me.

The rest of my week was spent rising with the sun, doing what I needed to get done for my job, sitting on my porch until sunset, and then sleeping deeper than I had in years.  Rumi quickly fell into the rhythm of the exercise and was happy to spend the evenings in my lap rather than insisting on exploring the marina.

I was aware that some sort of wheels were busy churning deep inside me during this time, but whatever was going on was at a level I couldn’t consciously follow or describe.  Something was just… happening.

Perhaps the most surprising revelation of all, however, was what happened when the media fast was over. Or rather, what didn’t happen.  I had thought when the fast ended, I would go on some sort of media-laden binge.  Instead, however, I seemed to have developed a profound aversion to “noise” which most of my previous media sources now felt like.  I barely thumbed through the magazines I’d purchased.  I ended up unsubscribing from roughly 2/3′s of the previous newsfeeds I had (and am still weeding through the remainder).  Instead of surfing the net constantly, I now may check it briefly in the morning and for a bit longer in the evening if there’s time. And I have next to no patience for email lists. The only thing I really returned to was books.  I’m still doing a significant amount of reading but I now seem to prefer focusing on one book at time.

It’s definitely been an interesting experience and I have a feeling I haven’t yet recognized the full impact.  I’ll tell you this, though–even if you don’t have the time to do a media fast for an entire week, I’d strongly encourage you to try at least 24 hours.  I can guarantee you’ll learn some interesting things about yourself and your habits.

Marina photo by Tammy at RowdyKittens

This post is written by Leo Babauta.  I am re-posting it here in compliance with Leo’s Uncopyright policy.  Leo recently published the book The Power of Less and he is the creator of the Top 100 blog, ZenHabits.

We’re in love with stuff — with shopping, with acquiring, with owning, with collecting.

Let’s lust after life instead.

Our obsession with stuff has become unhealthy. When we have a void in our lives, we buy things. When we have problems, we buy things. And these things are becoming more and more expensive, bigger, shinier … more wasteful.

This obsession with stuff leads to owning a lot, having a lot of clutter … and yet this stuff doesn’t fill our lives with meaning.

It leads to deep debt, from buying so much, and needing bigger houses and storage spaces to contain everything. Financially, we’re worse off than ever, because of this obsession with stuff.

We buy things when we’re depressed, we buy things for others to show how much we love them … and in this way, stuff has separated us from actually dealing with our emotions, blocked us from truly connecting with others.

Let’s replace that lust for stuff with a lust for life.

Some ideas:

• Rediscover a passion for life. Get outside and feel nature, appreciate the beauty of the world around you. Get active, do some gardening or yardwork, play a sport, go for a walk, take a hike, go for a swim, ride a bike. Feel the life coursing through you. Breathe it in.
• Give experiences as gifts, not stuff. Instead of shopping for someone come birthdays or Christmas, think of an experience you can give them instead. A date with you, doing something fun, hanging out, cooking, playing, talking, exploring. A fun time at a park or beach. Something other than everyday. An experience is much more meaningful than an object.
• Connect with others. In real life. If you haven’t hung out with a friend recently, give him a call and go hang out. Get your kid away from the TV or video game player and take her outside to do something. Go on a date with your partner. Visit your mom or grandparents. And be present while you’re with them — really listen, really be there.
• Deal with your emotions. If you have a need to buy things, to shop when you are having emotional issues, be more aware of this. Then deal with the underlying emotions, rather than using shopping as a way to forget about them. If you’re depressed, or anxious, or lonely, deal with those. Find solutions, figure out what’s causing them. Good news: experiencing life, getting active, and connecting with others all help you deal with those emotional issues.
• Disconnect your attachment to stuff. Sometimes I find myself reluctant to give something up, even if I don’t really use it. And that’s when I ask myself, “Why?” What is holding me back from getting rid of this possession? Sometimes, the item has an emotional connection, but then I realize that it’s just an object, it’s not the emotion or the actual source of the emotion. Then I’ll take a picture of the item, upload it to my computer, and get rid of the object. I feel liberated, because I’ve broken an attachment to a physical object (but saved the memory). If you are attached to an object, figure out why — it’s not healthy in the long run.
• Realize that life, not stuff, is what matters. Objects are just objects — if you lose them, if they get stolen or destroyed … it’s not a big deal. They’re just objects — not your life. Your life is the series of moments that is steaming through your consciousness right now, and how you use those moments and what you fill them with is what truly matters, not what you fill your home with. At the end of this short journey, you’ll look back and remember your experiences, the people you loved and who loved you back, the things you did and didn’t do. Not the stuff you had.