I’ve been doing this thing where I am using up my stuff. I have all sorts of hotel toiletries collected from my work trips; I’m using up the lotions, the soaps, the mouthwashes; finding homes (donating) the shampoos, the mini hand sanitizers. I am using up my many varieties of tea – a cupboard full. I’m not buying any of my favorites; I’m revisiting those I have and taking great satisfaction when yet another container is empty.
My condiments, my cleaners, my pens and pencils and various stationary; things I have forgotten I had and wasn’t even aware that I have so much of, I’m using and enjoying and finding a strange excitement when the last whatever it is is used, done, finis.
The list goes on, as does this odd little habit for some weeks. I am sure it is related to my hibernating patterns, my reemergence from some melancholy at the mild winter months and mild heartache. I don’t want to be here – I want to be elsewhere. I want winter. I want snow. I want to be up north. I am somehow preparing for my eventual exit…eventually I will list the house, I will move, I will be able to start new.
The early days of the year, I was nursing my broken heart, or revisiting it anyway. I know he’s not the one for me, but it was so nice to be loved, even for a little while. To love and be loved. I don’t like being stuck in the past—or the future, for that matter. I daily work to pull myself out of the funk, journaling for the purpose of identifying my desires and shifting my focus to what I desire.
For a while, I wallow. I sit in the ache and the hurt and the yuck, and I just allow it. Why I’m still in this town, in this house, in this solitary life. I let it wash through me in great dramatic swells. I give it the attention it’s been wanting, and discover of course that what I am missing or mourning was nothing like I am making it out to be — my town has been wonderful, filled with generosity and kindness, my home is so comfortable, solid and warm and safe, a true haven for the past decade. What “could have been” with my former love can still be – perhaps with someone else, a different place, another time. In a world of infinite possibilities, who am I to say that I missed my chance or that I had only the one opportunity for happiness, or that my ship has sailed. I realize too that in letting go of that ache, that hurt I was holding on to was some strange form of comfort.
Instead of looking for joy in using up my stuff, I begin to focus on what I do have – what does bring comfort, right here, right now. My dogs, my best pals ever. The daily walks we take into gorgeous woods with all sorts of splendor. My daughter and her husband, the two kindest people I know. My wonderful porch, with the windows and the pillows and the heater. I focus on these things, allow them to be enough, and they rapidly become so much more.
