Binned!

I just finished the book Power of Now by Vancouverite, Eckhart Tolle. I must say, I think this book has had a bit of an impact on me.

In the past, I have been quite a reader of the "spiritual growth" type books, but soon tired of them once most of them started saying the same type of thing... while I occasionally stumbled upon something helpful, the majority weren't really doing it for me anymore.

A very good friend of mine gave me "The Power of Now" for a birthday back in 2004 and for whatever reason, I just wasn't in the right place to read it back then. Even still, I basically only plucked it from the bookcase, because I had nothing else to read one night, while sitting with one of the kids as they fell asleep.

Tolle's words are helping me to let go of the anger I have too long held anger over the SIL and MIL incident. His words are helping me move on from past disappointments and hurts, especially about the career I planned, but never had. His concepts are really helping me let go of "stuff", which is symbolic I think, of this release of emotional baggage. I feel more capable of going with the flow, regardless of the uncertainties that still reign unclear at the present moment. I am reminding myself "in this exact moment, everything is perfect"...because it is. The past is gone, both 15 seconds ago and 15 years ago, and the future has not yet happened, this moment really IS perfect.

We have been sorting through all this stuff. We don't have that much stuff really; we are quite minimalistic people. But man...there is still all this....stuff. I love sorting through stuff I no longer need; clearing the path so to speak. It seems like it is just stuff, and yet it has always felt so freeing for me to do that.

We are having a garage sale in a couple of weeks and so there are piles of miscellaneous goods stacked in the corner of our lounge room. Tonight we have gone through the office cupboard. Every house, it seems, has a dumping ground. My parents chose their pool table. We tend to throw papers and foreign objects into the office cupboard with the intention of sorting through the clutter and filing it properly, in the ill defined time of later.

Tonight, while going through a stack of notebooks and paid bills, I found, yet again, the diary I kept while in year 12; I spoke about it a couple of weeks ago - the one that was filled with teenage angst and unintentional hilarity. I threw it out. I don't need it. Yeah, it holds some of my history in it. For sure, it talks about the emotional pain I was in at the time. It talks about parental frustrations, school struggles, boyfriend issues, stupid pranks played on school friends, bad poetry and other stuff, but why keep it? For 18 years I have kept that diary as a reminder of my youth; as a material snippet of my journey thus far; perhaps even as a testimony to or evidence of my very existence.....I don't need it anymore.