I’ve been pondering, as I wade my way through countless boxes of things that I consider necessary for my style of living, how sorting out my possessions is much like what happens when a person decides, for whatever reasons, to follow the blood type diet. There is much sorting and grouping. What to keep, what the reasons for keeping these items in one’s life, how important it may be to chuck items.

In my life, my treasured possessions, sometimes for only sentimental reasons, belong to my “beneficial” category. They may add nothing to the quality of my life on the surface, yet going without them can cause a great deal of trauma. For example, I still mourn the loss of a favourite cookbook, lost in another, long distant move. It is no longer in print, nor available on the shelves of used book stores, no matter how diligently I search. This slight yearning for what is no longer available to me creates an unknown stress in my mind, and therefore, by association of mind with body, in my body as well. I was fascinated a few months ago, watching a video tape about scientific research into the mind, to find that science has discovered that the mind does not have a specific home of it’s own, in the brain, as we were mostly raised to believe. Instead, each cell in the body contains an element of mind. This is indeed an awesome thought for one of my age, for it shatters one of the greatest illusions I had chosen to treasure almost every day of my life.

Then there are the unwanted items, the things piled in a corner to be delivered to the local charity store that employs people to sort and resell unwanted possessions. What is one person’s nightmare is another’s treasure. This is very similar to the way many of the food items behave, once one reduces them to their blood type level. In the course of packing and unpacking all of my worldly possessions in the past month or so, I have had time to inspect them all closely, twice. There are some things that I’ve definitely outgrown a need to keep. Those are the easy ones to dispose of. But there are others, items that have some sort of aura of preciousness about them. They will surely be handy “some day”, even though for now they will simply repose in a drawer or location new to them for the moment. It’s at times such as these that my Great Depression inheritance looms large before me, having been raised by survivors of the depression who wasted nothing and saved everything of value because it could be useful “some day”. It takes great resolve to overcome this inherited system of valuation, which for me varies in strength from day to day.

Following the blood type diet, one needs to keep assessing and reassessing not only the progress that has been made on a great many levels, but how to improve and streamline our lives. Do we need to keep as many foods as we do, in our cupboard that are simply “neutral”? Do we follow the diet guidelines as carefully as we might? Can we benefit from following what our dear friend, Mike Staffieri has outlined, checking the recommendations listed in Live Right for Your Type, and seeing how we can improve our intakes in various areas now that we’ve gotten through the initial phase of simply knowing which foods are beneficial and which are avoids?

Moving gives the gift of a great many possibilities opening in exactly the same way that we open a closet door or empty a drawer of its contents and seeing things, of necessity, with new eyes. What was valuable when we stuffed it in there a year or two ago (or longer) may no longer hold any charm or interest today. The blood type diet as well is a source of constant movement, assessment, and the possibility of discarding the old – old ways of thinking, old attachments to what has perhaps become broken (and therefore useless) over time, old mind-sets about the value of certain items.

My new home gives the possibility of new combinations of old things, new ways of arranging furnishings and accents, and, perhaps best of all (though not without its personal pain), eliminating what no longer has value or simply can’t fit into the new configuration of space. I find myself in a very interesting situation: I have more area than I did in my old home, but less storage room in which to keep the things I believed were too precious to discard. Today’s situation dictates that I must indeed discard, discard and discard, and in that gradual stripping away of small piles of objects, to find a new freedom, a new way of being, a new pleasure in openness. At the same time, a great many items have had to be added, small and otherwise, in order to accommodate the facilities available to me. Change is good, evaluation even better, and making wise decisions is absolutely required in every aspect of life, whether moving into a new home or simply looking with fresh eyes at how we regard ordinary, regular routines and situations, from the inner to the outer. Perhaps we can make small adjustments in every aspect of our lives that simply improve the quality a hundred-fold.