Even though this Winter in Wisconsin has been a very looooonnnnnngggg ordeal, it is finally looking like Spring.  And I’ve become a spring cleaning whirlwind.

One of the metaphors of losing a substantial amount of weight is holding on.  In order to lose weight, I had to let go of old ideas.  The less I grasped at trivial things out of a mental sense of scarcity, the more abundance I found.  And stuff… well, letting go of the saboteur in my mind was tough, but it mysteriously made throwing away the crap in the attic easy.

So, I love letting go of stuff.  And I was busy letting go of lots of clutter in my home office this weekend when I opened a drawer that is sticky and often stuck.  It obviously hadn’t been opened in years.  I knew that because, inside, were…. old bank statements.  Very old bank statements.

Some of the statements were so old they had returned checks inside (yes, that old!).

So, I sat on the floor and dragged this over:

 

As I began to feed the shredder, I was fascinated by what blurred past my eyes.  It was a little snapshot of a true lifestyle change.

Checks to Domino’s Pizza made way for checks to the food co-op.  In fact, takeout names disappeared gradually but completely.

Payments to the chiropractor (literally many dozen a year) gave way to checks to Bikram Yoga.  (I once saw a chiropractor 43 times one year.  After a year of yoga, I saw her 7 times the next year and haven’t seen her since then.)

Checks to Walgreens for drugs blended into payments for my organic vegetable share.

As they flew by, I also saw checks to my son’s elementary school give way to checks to his middle school, and finally to his high school.

Yes, life passes by, mirrored in the payments we make.

Which payments from your checkbook could be replaced with something healthier?

I didn’t plan it that way.  I would have never noticed it quite so starkly depicted, but that stuck drawer showed me a new perspective on the changes that occur when lifestyle changes.