If I were another person looking at the bag, I might first think how ridiculous it is to have a bag of random items put together. After all, those items have been sitting around collecting dust just fine for a couple of years or more. Why not just pack them up along with all of the other dust catchers that we move and take them with us? That would be a fair point. We do have lots of items that just sit around collecting dust (sound familiar to anyone else?). But we decided to take the opportunity to go through at least some of our possessions and purge what we can. We are not ready to go full Marie Kondo (if you don’t know who she is, this link will help), but we do think about de-cluttering from time to time.
Another thought that someone might have is to throw out that bag of stuff. That is logical. If we don’t need it, why not pitch it? We have made serious efforts in our house to cut down on what goes into the landfills. We try to recycle as much as we can. The biggest thing that we have done in our lives is quit buying everything we see that catches our eye for two seconds. There is an awful lot that we can (all) live without, and we try to not even bring most of those (gotta have it) items into our home. We don’t really miss them. But we don’t want to throw out items that have value and could be put to use by others. The whole reduce, reuse part of the triangle (I’ve blogged about that before; click the link if you are curious) is important.
Taking the small bag of items to a local Goodwill or other similar shop allows for them to resell and help folks find work. Someone who shops gets a bargain to boot. That sounds like a win all around to me. And I’m big on having everyone win whenever possible (but not everyone getting a trophy). We get less clutter, someone else gets a bargain, and other people get meaningful work. Did I mention that there is less in the landfill, too?
I know a small bag may seem like nothing, but imagine if you were to get rid of a small bag of stuff every month. Or maybe you get ambitious and get rid of a small bag every couple of weeks. We all have things that we can live without. And once you get started letting go of the little (material) things, it’s easier to find the joy in what is left behind.