A teeny tiny milestone- woohooo!

So I just got back from a beautiful road trip through New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah. I travel a lot for leisure and normally come home with a stockpile of souvenirs that I display in my home, something to remind me of my journeys. Right around the time I was about to set out on the road a couple weeks ago, I looked at all “my” past souvenirs and realized how attached I was to them all. I can’t tell you how often I’d notice a souvenir on a shelf or next to the tv and it would send me daydreaming back to those trips. Maybe not such a bad thing, but then I realized I was having not-quite-so-accurate memories of those past trips. Through my attachment to those souvenirs, I was creating happiness that probably didn’t entirely exist at the time, if that makes sense. I was remembering the trips the way I had wanted to remember them, not as they actually happened, in other words, forgetting the challenges on the trips or things that didn’t work out, and magnifying the fun times disproportionately.

So that being said, on THIS trip, I unexpectedly found myself not desiring to buy even a single souvenir the whole time. I wasn’t suppressing any desires- I looked deeply and just noticed they weren’t even there. In the past, I’d buy lots of mugs, and t-shirts, and animal figurines. This time? Nothing. There wasn’t any concern about how I’d have nothing to display to remind myself of RoadTrip 2010. Don’t get me wrong, I think out of some weird habit I did question whether I’d regret not having at least SOMETHING small to remind me of my trip, and I did browse a few gift shops, but there was nothing pulling, tugging, pushing, urging me to purchase. It was such a foreign, new feeling which is why I’m yammering on about it now.

So there you have it. Hey, it’s a start:)

Good for you. It is a great feeling when we realize we don’t need so much stuff around to remind us of other stuff.

Someone wisely called it a “relaxed indifference”. Thanks for sharing a very eloquent experience.

Congrats! You still have your memories and photos! I love to travel, but in the US gift stores everything is from china…I can order it on the ebay for 2 cents:)
Getting something native is more interesting, but still creates bad habit of cluttering the house with staff and attachment of you good memories to the “thing”

post some picture from you trip here!

Thanks guys. It was just a pleasant affirmation that dedication to my practice is yielding results. Well, there’s been lots of results, but this one was unique for me. I’ve been a huge fan of de-cluttering for years, but it was always an effort. As Suhas put it, is is a ‘relaxed indifference’. It’s like a weight lifted from the shoulders.