People overestimate the pleasure they’ll get from having more stuff. This does not apply to new rose bushes, crayons, or yarn stashes.

Dr. SunWolf

In every place John and I have lived in, we have always had a closet, a bedroom, a shed, a garage dedicated to boxes of stuff. I had photos albums from high school, family photos, things that had belonged to my mother, memories from college, clothes I had hoped to fit in to again someday, and etc. John had his boxes of memories, too…and etc. Since we have been married, we have lived in seven states and one foreign country. And with those moves, we carried those boxes of stuff. I do not remember what officially sparked being fed up with having so much, but I do know I was tired of having to find places for it. I do know that if we ever move, I do not want to take all that stuff with me again. I do know that in the desert area where I live, dust falls on everything. And I do mean, e v e r y t h i n g. If I don’t wear a shirt for awhile that has been hanging in the closet, a layer of dust will be on the shoulders of the shirt and it has to be washed before I can wear it. Or if I hadn’t shampooed our bedroom carpet in the seven years we have lived here (just for a possible example), a layer of sand and dust will be found on baseboards hidden behind dressers…which have their own layer of dust because it is annoying to move things off dressers to thoroughly dust.

Everything we own is something we have to think about- how to store it, how to clean it, or how to use it and when left too long, the task to organize becomes overwhelming. I had saved old college papers I had written, my husband had his school papers he had saved. We had books, old letters, photos, and little bits and pieces such as keys, and coins, and dead batteries. Some of that was found in a bucket we had used to clean out the truck a long while ago; we just moved the items to another location and cluttered up another space. In the last few years, we have been convicted over being better stewards over our possessions and have been figuring out how to live with just what we need. Anything we own, we want it to have a purpose and we want to manage it and our time well. Time spent cleaning, sorting, organizing years of stuff is not the way we want to spend our days.

I loved the quote at the top of the page because we have, indeed, overestimated the pleasure of having stuff and the journey to possessing less stuff is a lot of work because it affects every area of life from clothing, to books, to papers, to memorabilia, to appliances, to furniture. I also loved the top statement because it implies that you can never have enough pleasure from roses. While I may not get too much pleasure from crayons or stashes of yarn, I do love my roses and wouldn’t mind a few more in the yard. Everyone in the family enjoys them and they add a different, simple sort of pleasure to our summer.

Speaking of roses, here are June’s #straygifts (photo of a rose included) with the themes of finding something: early, tiny, sunny, and in the shadows.

1. Morning Glories are starting to show up in various places in the yard. The time to see them in bloom is early morning.
2. Red roses are thriving in a sunny spot. There are more on the bush, but I loved this one in particular because of the sun rays.
3. I have no idea what these tiny flowers are. I believe these flowers came from the birdseeds the birds like to scatter from their feeder.
4. In the shadows, a sunflower is growing – from the same birdseed package as the flower growing in photo number three.