somewhere along the line, i have come to equate having something with reaping its benefits.

allow me to explain. take, for example, the time that i thought i should probably take vitamins. so i went to the store, bought a bottle of vitamins, put them in my bathroom cabinet and never opened them. because having them there is the same as taking them, right?

right.

it's like my friend cathy who recently bought a keyboard. she bought a pretty nice one, but not one of the cool ones with weighted keys and fancy gadgets. after she bought it, she fretted to me that maybe she should have gone with the more expensive one, maybe she would learn to play the piano if she had a cool keyboard like that.

i told her that having the keyboard doesn't actually add more time to her day (she's a super-busy lady) and that every time i look in my cabinet, i feel guilty that i'm not taking those vitamins. at least that bottle was only five bucks - not the hundreds that she would have paid for her keyboard (and who needs hundreds of dollars of guilt staring them down every morning?).

which got me thinking: how much do we buy for the person we are and how much do we buy for the person we think we would like to be? how many things are sitting in our homes reminding us of who we are pretending to be? do i really need all those blank journals? does mike use his bike trainer? am i really going to read that dickens book in this century? (say what you like in his favor, i know i'm not).

when you have as little space in your home as we do in our apartment, these questions become much more important.

yet, as i was about to throw the guilt vitamins away, i stopped, opened the bottle and actually took one.

turns out there are some things that i'm not willing to give up trying to improve.