What are you holding on to?
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I’ve moved many times over the years. It’s marvelous. It’s a pain in the butt.
One of the ways it is useful is to help keep the flotsam and jetsam that comes into your life under control.
As you pull out yet another cardboard box, you pick up some item and ask: Is this really worth keeping?
That doesn’t stop you arriving in the new destination with several boxes of what turns out to be useless crap that you’ve somehow unaccountably packed anyway. But at least it’s fewer boxes.
Artist Jasper Joffe is going one step further, and selling everything he owns. He’s looking for a new freedom and getting rid of all the stuff around him is a bold way to do it.
I asked a similar question in the perennially popular The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun: What’s weighing you down?
If you’re pursuing Great Work – and you are – you’ll find the barnacles on your hull are making it difficult to cut through the water. What do you need to get rid of?
I find there’s usually a very tough balance between learning from one’s mistakes and having a clean slate. Often, when moving to a new place or starting a new task I let the emotions of past failures drag along with me, rather than the exhilaration of past successes. It’s probably just a matter of perspective and attitude. Maybe if I learned to have a more pragmatic approach to understanding why I failed or why I succeeded, and take those criteria with me instead.
I think I need to get rid of the memory of feeling ineffective, frustrated, and/or scared. And I need to hang on to remembering how to take a deep breath, to make a plan, to ask for advice. Probably the thing worth remembering most: I’m still learning.