Light

Not so long ago, I got a new wallet for Christmas. You'll recall my writing about it. It's very nice, so of course the first thing I did was to jam it full of everything that was in the old wallet (and which probably shortened its functional lifespan). I just did this automatically without taking advantage of the obvious opportunity for assessing the necessity of every item and thus increasing efficiency by winnowing down the number of items in there.

Well, I've done that now. You can just imagine the kinds of things I found in there. There are always going to be blank slips of paper that used to be receipts before the ink rubbed off. What was I going to do with those? I certainly wasn't going to use them for the purpose of substantiating claims for reimbursement. You have to have an employer for that. I wasn't going to use them for claiming business expenses on my taxes either, because I think you have to have actual tax liability first.

There were lots of things like that in there. I found a coupon for some service, and I looked to see whether it was still valid. It had expired four years ago. I had to have transferred that expired coupon not just from my last wallet to this one, but from that last wallet's predecessor as well. It truly boggles the mind, as does much of what else I had in there. I also removed a small mirror I was keeping in it, though not out of awareness that it was unnecessary. My new mirrored sunglasses just rendered it redundant.

Having cleared things out, I feel better. I'm traveling lighter and faster. The wallet will last longer and look prettier. I myself will look because because of the lessened impact that the wallet will have on my shape. Of course, the cycle now begins again. I'm probably not going to stay on top of this from day to day. Like most people, I am highly motivated in times of crisis but not so good about prevention. Well, who wants to isolate themselves with something so tedious?