Anyone who needs a quick meditation on purgatory should try preparing their worldly belonging for an Interstate move.
Not only does packing this stuff up (and then living out of boxes for several weeks) make a good penance, but the process also makes one want to get rid of stuff that they previously wanted (or in some cases get rid of things that they still want). It seems to me that having tediously to pile all of my loot together into one place makes me quite surfeited. For instance, I've become so sick of packing things that I've started just giving things away...things that I've lugged around with me for over ten years and that had become permanent fixtures in my apartment. There is a kind of emptiness now where my life size Boba Fett once stood. My bedroom feels somehow empty...despite the mounds of junk.
It also means that I'm forced to make comparative value judgments. Take my collection of board games. Literally. I'm giving them away.
I have some board games that are still in their original cellophane after innumerable years. I'm mostly holding on to them for sentimental reasons because they were gifts. I've been planning on donating them to the CSC, since they seem awfully bulky to move and they'd just end up sitting around again.
But then I looked at the size of some of the things I was going to keep that had less monetary or sentimental value, and realized my system of determining what to keep and dispose of wasn't very consistent. Thus, the board games became a kind of litmus test of what was worth keeping. To keep something the size of the Cranium box should have to mean that it was worth more than the Cranium box, but that wasn't always the case. In other words, my stack of board games isn't nearly as bad a problem as my stack of clearance toys.
Suffice to say, I've gotten rid of a lot of toys using the Cranium box test.
By now you can probably figure out how I'm going to allegorize this: If we are going to get rid of our spiritual baggage, we should spend more time on the junk that's really a problem rather than being impressed with ourselves for getting rid of stuff that isn't really bothering us or anybody else for that matter.
What are the minor character quirks that we spend more time addressing as a means of distracting us from working on the serious character flaws that lead us astray?
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