One thing I want to do during the period of this 30 day blogging challenge. I want to get rid of some of the things I own. Those ones that I don’t really need … or to be precise, those things that don’t belong to myself in an ideal lifestyle of mine.

At this stage, I’m drawn towards a lifestyle of a vagabond. A minimalistic lifestyle, that is. Ideally, I want to be able to carry everything I need in a 40l backpack. When it comes to the clothing department, I’m rather fine. I could have only a few clothes and be fine about it.

What I find most difficult is books. I always liked reading books. When I was a little kid, I would put my favorite books around my pillow before going to bed. In fact, I still do that, although I hardly put a pile of books around my pillow anymore. Now it’s just one or two.

I wonder what makes it difficult for me to let go of those books. I’d definitely need some of them for reference, like most of my philosophy books. There are some other books that I got a number of inspirations from; these ones are harder to let go. There are books I feel as if I would reread at a later stage of my life.

This attachment to material objects.

But then, in most cases, what I really want to keep is the content of those books rather than physical copies of those books. Perhaps it’s not so much about letting go of material objects that holds us back, but it’s the fear of forgetting what we’ve learnt or experienced through reading those books. This seems to apply to other objects like clothes or photos. It’s not really about those objects, but the memories we associate with them that matter.

Memories. There’s something about memories that I want to talk about more. I’ll save this topic for another day.

In any case, this post will serve me as a public statement of my intention to get rid of unnecesarry things I still own. It’s a small step I take towards this goal. So, let’s see what happens.