I may never use it but I will know it is there...

I'm smack in the middle of moving.  Moving my way too much stuff into storage because I cannot bring myself to just chuck it all out. 

It is obvious to me that my motivations are very different than my friends and family.  People helping me keep saying the stupidest things.   "You are going to feel so liberated when you get done getting rid of all this stuff."  "Bet all this work will make you never want to collect this much stuff again." "Doesn't this feel great, getting rid of all this stuff?"

No, it doesn't feel great.  No, it doesn't make me want to not collect, it makes me want to never move again.  I seriously doubt that I'll feel liberated.  What I do feel is diminished.  As though all those things I have are part of me, that I have to give up because I don't have money enough to have the space to keep them.

So, taking a break in the sorting decision making process, I go on spacebook and my daughter-in-law mentions hanging out at the pool at her apartment complex and I say something that I realize as soon as I hit send is a core of my desire to keep everything.  I say "Pool envy.  The next apartment I get will have a pool.  I may never use it, but I will know it is there."

I may never use it -- much of my stuff is raw materials for making things. and much of it I DON'T use.  Either I can't get to it cause of the stuff in front of it, or I don't know which box it is in, or I start some other project I don't finish either.  But I know it is there.  I can sometime in the future, when I decide to work on my UFO's (UnFinished Objects), or serendipitously find it while working on some project it works with, or I slowly uncover that box in my efforts to get my stuff in order and I finish that project.

Like a dragon, I have my piles of treasure.  Why do I keep them? Because I am a dragon.  It is what dragons do.  They don't have to be useful, they just have to be there.