Sometimes you just get what you need...

I really do believe the world works in mysterious ways. I took a big bag of stuff to a charity the other day, but I didn't feel good about it like I normally do. The more I thought about it, the more it came to me why that was the case. You see, my process is like an onion or a series of concentric circles.
Getting past the first layers were easy, in fact, I do them everyday with junk mail. The next couple layers were increasingly more difficult. "I have the space to keep lots of items and it even looks aesthetically appealing." That is the old me. To dig deeper is so hard because I am shedding the mid layer of non-essentials, but these are items that weren't cheap! My inner cheapskate was now in a struggle with my inner minimalist (for lack of a better word). It was a bloody mental battle!!! I then realized that my bedroom is the staging area for the accumulation and processing of this stuff I had been sitting on the fence about. I missed my clear physical space and I missed my clear mental space. So I bagged up 99% of this "potentially valuable" stuff and donated it. I felt sick to my stomach.
In a wonderful stroke of serendipity though, Zen Habits had just the blog entry I was needing to read today. I feel better about the big purge already. What's funny is that I would give the same advice to someone else, anytime and anywhere! Sometimes we just need to hear it from someone different than ourselves when it is our own onion we are peeling.