Four Steps Toward Clarity

"Rich or poor, your life will touch many other lives, and the way in which it touches them is your choice and will determine the legacy you leave to the world." Suze Orman

Don't own anything you don't want or need or love, value every item you own. Your possessions represent who you are, what you care about, how you define yourself: your taste and your value system.

Most of us have an abundance of STUFF, stuff that really does not matter. Especially when thinking about what is really important --- eternal life ... eternal relationships ... spiritually healthy living ...

Suze Orman recommends Four Steps Toward Clarity in regards to our possessions. For those of use who have been around a while, especially being in one house for more than a couple years these excercises can possibly be rewarding (especially 1 & 3 & 4).

Below is from Suze Orman's book The Courage to be Rich:

1. Wander through your house, your garage, looking through your drawers, closets, and cupboards with the goal of finding at least 25 items that you are willing to throw away - yes throw away. Anything from warn-out shoes, grimy duplicate can openers, broken toys, and lipsticks that were definitely a mistake to spent toothbrushes, unused cleaning products, and earrings with one half the pair missing. Broken umbrellas, dried-up cans of paint, candle stubs. Bits of things where there's not even enough left to use. Twenty-five items. Keep looking until you find them. These items are gone, and I want you to throw them away.

2. Now go through your house again, this time in search of loose change and the occassional bill squirreled away. Look in your handbags and briefcase. Look in the pockets of your pants, jackets, shirts, and coats; look under the cushions of your chairs and couches, and inbetween the seats of your car. Do you have a penny jar somewhere? Go get it. Look through your jewelry box where you keep you cuff links. Rummage through the kitchen drawers, any other secret places where you might have left or placed some money. If you are like most of us, you will find, all together, $30 or more. Then put the money you've found in a jar - call it a jar of abundance - or a bowl - a bowl of bounty - to remind you of what you didn't even know you had, and put it near where you keep your bills.

3. Go through your house a third time. This time, find at least 25 items that are still in good shape but are truthfully of no further use to you. Clothes you or your family no longer wear, winter coats, scarves, hats, old belts, handbags, dishes, a working appliance you have replaced, videos, a stack of books you no longer need, still-good looking toys. Twenty-five items that someone else could use and would be greatful to have. After you have gathered everything, reflect a minute on the money you spent, how much was wasted, and how little you have to show for it now.
Gather the items and give them away ... to someone who could use it now or to St.V's or Goodwill.

4. Now go through your house a fourth time, pausing to touch and look at the items that mean everything in the world to you, the items you would never part with, ever - photographs of family and friends, a ring your mother gave you, the desk that was your grandmother's, scrapbooks, perhaps a painting in your living room that was the first thing ou and you spouse ever bought together. Now thinking of these items so precious to you, and little in fact they cost to you. Define for yourself the true meaning of worth.